


Relict

by McSpot



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: 2018-2019 NHL Season, Age Regression/De-Aging, Alternate Universe, Gen, San Jose Sharks, like the supernatural kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 17:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 39,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23607787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McSpot/pseuds/McSpot
Summary: Joe Thornton falls asleep as a Boston Bruin in the midst of a miserable rookie season and wakes up in San Jose with no memory of how he came to be there, surrounded by a team he doesn't recognize, who all insist he plays for the Sharks now.  There's also a little blonde Swedish kid and a toddler who refuses to wear socks and somehow they are both Joe's responsibility.  It doesn't take long for Joe to realize that something more is going on, but it's not the answer he expected.
Comments: 82
Kudos: 232





	1. Holotype

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Worlds_Okayest_Goalie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Worlds_Okayest_Goalie/gifts).

> I started writing "a short fic" back at the end of the 2019 season with the intent that I would finish it before the first round of the playoffs, and then the second, because I wanted to finish it before Joe Thornton played his possible last game (how stupid of me, he's playing for another ten years). The idea was initially created with flufflybunnypants on Tumblr but it's grown so much from what I'd initially imagined, to the point that I ended up having to split it into two phases of story. Second part will hopefully be completed soon.
> 
> I wanted to get this done in time for her birthday and wasn't able to finish the whole thing, but I'd say I got a good chunk done, at least. Happy Birthday to flufflybunnypants, I hope I've done Joe justice. Unedited but that's what you expect from me by now :P

_Holotype: a single type specimen upon which the description and name of a new species is based._

Joe didn't remember falling asleep, but he remembered waking up in San Jose. Which was a little unnerving, because last he'd been aware, he was in Boston. He didn't even know he was in San Jose until someone told him.

One of the San Jose Sharks told him, because Joe woke up in their arena, in San Jose, on the other side of the country from Boston, surrounded by players he didn't remember being on the San Jose Sharks. Not that he was an expert on their roster, but he didn't see hide nor hair of Nolan or Friesen. When he asked where Marleau was, desperately searching for a familiar face, everyone winced and refused to meet his eyes.

"What the fuck is going on?" Joe normally would have winced at how high his voice got, cracking embarrassingly at the end, except he was too busy trying not to have a panic attack. "I need – do you guys have a phone I can use? I need to call my coach, the team is probably wondering where I am, and I can't-"

He startled when a small hand landed on his thigh, tugging insistently at his jeans. When he looked down, a tiny blonde kid smiled up at him with a big, toothy grin, and said, "_Det är okej_."

Joe blinked. "What the fuck- oh shit, my bad- oh, crap-"

A couple of the Sharks snorted loudly. "Smooth, Jumbo," someone muttered.

The kid, thankfully oblivious, or more likely having no clue what they were saying, just kept smiling. He was wearing a set of Sharks-branded pajamas, even though Joe was fairly sure it was still before noon.

"Uh?" Joe looked around helplessly, feeling his face turn red. His voice notched up another embarrassing octave. "Whose kid is this?"

"Oh, that's Marcus," said also-Joe-but-call-me-Pavs, the only guy to introduce himself so far and definitely not someone Joe remembered hearing about before despite clearly having been around the league a while. "He's going to be hanging out with you for a bit. Actually..."

Pavs looked down at the floor, frowning and scanning it for something. "Oh, shit, where's Bancer?"

There was a flurry of muttered curses and movement before a big guy with no teeth and way too much beard shouted, "Got him!"

He tugged a dark-haired toddler down from where he'd apparently been trying to climb to the shelf above one of the stalls. The kid giggled the whole time, clearly extremely pleased with himself. He was also in a set of Sharks pajamas, because evidently that's what the Sharks used to label their children.

Pavs turned back to Joe and gave him a smile he absolutely didn't believe. "And that's Kevin. You're going to be hanging out with him and Marcus until we get a handle on what's going on."

Joe felt it was pretty fair of him to balk at that. "What? They're little kids!"

"So are you," muttered a guy with tired eyes and some type of accent.

Well that was fucking rude.

"I'm eighteen!" Joe yelped. His voice was definitely not doing him any favors today.

"_Oh my God_," more than one person groaned.

"You're a fucking infant," someone tacked on. Joe turned to glare at him, but he stared back unerringly. "Oh man, the feathered hair, it's like fucking Farrah Fawcett up in here."

Joe frowned and put a hand to his head. There was nothing wrong with his hair.

"He's like a baby," a guy who looked to be Joe's age mumbled in awed disgust.

Joe liked to think he was a pretty patient guy, but he was freaking the fuck out right now and everyone resoundingly insulting him wasn't making that better. "Look, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I play for the Boston Bruins and I need to get back to my team."

Half the guys in front of him winced and the other half looked like they'd just stepped in vomit.

"That's so disturbing," someone muttered.

"Joooooeeeeeee," the little blonde kid chanted in a sing-song voice, tugging on Joe's hand now. Joe looked down at him briefly, a little unnerved by the big grey-blue eyes staring up at him, unblinking. The kid then proceeded to babble something in a foreign language again, as if expecting Joe to understand him.

"Uh, can someone come claim their kid, because I have to go."

He tugged his hand away from the kid. It took more effort than he'd expected, because the kid held on tight, frowning affrontedly when he realized Joe wasn't playing a game and was trying to move away from him.

"_Joe_," he scolded in a tone far too severe for someone who barely reached Joe's waist.

Normally Joe would have felt bad for disappointing a kid, but he didn't know this kid and he didn't really want to be here anymore, so he ignored the kid's whining and started towards the first door that looked like an exit.

"Whoa, whoa, Jumbo, hey, where you going man?" Yet another bearded guy Joe didn't know tried to wedge himself between Joe and the door; based on his stance alone Joe would say he was a goalie, but damned if he didn't recognize him.

He didn't know any of these guys, and maybe he hadn't played the Sharks in October because he'd been out with a goddamned broken arm, but he was pretty sure that the Sharks had Vernon and Hrudey in net, and Todd Gill was captain but that Pavs guy had a C on the jersey hanging in his stall, and if these were the Sharks then where the _fuck_ was Marleau?

"I don't know, out! Away from here!" When Joe tried to dodge the goalie he followed along, and suddenly everyone was crowding in, blocking the exit and backing him towards one of the stalls, hands up like Joe was unstable and needed to be gentled.

It did nothing to comfort him.

"Joe, let's just sit down for a moment-"

"Hey, no, man-"

"Calm down, Jumbo-"

They all kept pressing closer, a sea of unfamiliar faces wrapped in foreign teal, until the backs of Joe's legs hit wood.

And Joe exploded.

"Why do you all keep calling me that?!" He dragged his hands through his hair, eyes wide. He hadn't meant to shout, but he could feel the reverberation of it in his chest now, hear it bouncing off the walls.

The team looked stunned, some of them actually backing off.

But the other Joe – Pavs – he just frowned, less angry and more...sad.

"Joe," he said quietly. His voice had lost that chipper flippancy from before, and his face was haggard, exhausted. "I'm sorry, we won't call you that anymore. We're not trying to upset you. You've...forgotten some things. A lot of things."

A cold spike of fear skittered over Joe's spine, leaving goose bumps in its wake. Along with the sickening, terrifying, impossible feeling that Pavs was telling the truth.

Pavs's eyes were big and apologetic when he said, "Joe, you have a concussion. You don't remember being traded to the Sharks."

Joe sat down on the bench with a loud _thump_.

A concussion. It would make sense, maybe, except for where it _didn't_. He'd been concussed before, and this didn't feel like a concussion – but he didn't know _what_ this felt like, because everything felt wrong. It was like someone had come into his head and shifted everything a foot to the left, so that it all looked the same but he knew that something was viscerally _wrong_ with him and it wasn't expressing itself in light sensitivity and migraines.

But he was surrounded by people who claimed to know him, none of whom he'd ever heard of before but all of whom looked very concerned right now. That concern felt genuine, even if nothing else did.

If it was true though, that he'd been concussed so badly as to forget a _trade_? A trade in his rookie season – when it had taken him months to even get his debut game after he broke his arm...

He knew he wasn't living up to expectations. First overall draft pick, and he starts off by getting injured, and then he just kept fucking up, kept getting healthy scratched because he couldn't put up points...

The media in Boston was more than blatantly obvious. He knew what they said about him, a waste of a draft pick. They should have picked Marleau. Look at how well Samsonov was playing, on track to win the Calder – imagine if Boston had drafted Marleau first overall, if Marleau and Samsonov could have played on a line together what kind of future that would have painted for the Bruins. Oh well, at least they got something good out of that draft, even if the first overall was a loss.

It would make sense for them to shop Joe around, even if he'd thought he'd get more time. He'd thought they would give him a chance to improve, to learn and grow – he'd barely had a _chance_, after getting hurt in the preseason, he'd never played professional hockey before and he was just eighteen, he was only just getting his footing – but Sergei wasn't having that problem, or Marleau. And here Joe was, injured again, so badly that he couldn't even remember his new team.

What was to say this one would want to keep him either?

Joe ducked his head when his eyes started to burn. His nails dug crescents into his palms, a reminder that this was the absolute last side of himself that he wanted to show to the new team that he was evidently already fucking up in front of.

But he didn't _know_ these people, and he'd already fucked up bad enough to get thrown out of Boston, and he didn't remember a huge chunk of his past and nothing made sense (but it made _too much_ sense) and he was so fucking scared-

He startled when a chubby little hand smacked against his knee. Joe watched in confusion as the dark-haired toddler clambered his way into Joe's lap with no small amount of effort. Once completing that task, the toddler dug his hands into Joe's shirt to keep steady as he pulled himself to a stand. He was staring Joe in the eye then, their noses an inch apart.

And then he used one of those pudgy hands to happily smack Joe's cheek. "Hi, Joe!"

Joe blinked against the bemusement and the tears, trying desperately and utterly failing to make sense of the situation. His voice was embarrassingly hoarse when he said, "Hi, uh..."

He racked his brain for the kid's name, but it just wasn't coming.

"Bancer," said one of the younger guys on the Sharks, one of the dozen who sounded European of some sort.

The others turned to scowl at him, clearly finding this as unhelpful as Joe did.

"That's Kevin." Pavs's smile was back, smaller this time, but a little indulgent as he watched Kevin continue to pat at Joe's cheek. "The other one is Marcus."

Apparently not wanting to be forgotten, Marcus scrambled up onto the bench next to Joe. It took Joe a moment to realize that the kid was trying to hug him, seeing as he had his arms wrapped around Joe's shoulder and his hands barely hit the middle of Joe's chest. "_Var inte ledsen_, Joe."

"Uh..." Joe swiped the back of his hand over his eyes, gratified that it came away dry. He then quickly used it to steady Kevin, who was playing some weird game with himself that involved squatting down and standing up again, all while standing on Joe's legs. "Does Marcus speak...?"

"He only speaks Swedish," said a guy who looked like a pirate, if said pirate was, presumably, a Swedish model. He smiled, flashing dimples and perfect teeth. "He said not to be sad."

Marcus didn't seem to know or care if Joe could understand him, beaming at him all the same, resting his head on Joe's shoulder.

Joe stared at Pavs, helpless. "Who are these kids? I don't..."

He swallowed his words. He didn't have to tell them that he didn't remember, that he didn't know what was going on.

The kids were sweet, obviously knew who he was, and he felt like such an ass, staring at them blankly when they tried to make him feel better.

Make him feel better because apparently he was just fucking up left and right this year.

When he looked at Pavs for answers this time, though, Pavs was wearing an uncomfortable expression. "Uh...well. It's kind of a long story."

Joe frowned. "Don't they belong to any of you? Or like, a coach...?"

He craned his neck, looked around the room again, glad for the distraction. He'd yet to see anyone who liked like a member of management, or even the training and equipment staff, which was all mildly concerning, especially given the circumstances.

"Uh, in a way," Pavs said slowly. "It's sort of like they belong to the team."

"Okay, but who are their parents?"

"They don't have any," one of the European kids said.

Joe blinked. So did a good chunk of the team, turning to frown at him.

A horrible thought crossed Joe's mind. "Are you saying...that they're orphans?"

He felt awful just thinking it, looking down at Marcus nuzzling against his shoulder, Kevin trying to grab his own foot while standing and failing spectacularly.

"Not since we adopted them!" announced a big guy with way too much gel in his long dark hair. He yelped when someone smacked him right afterwards – and if Joe knew crazy eyes, that would be the other goaltender.

"You...adopted them."

"_We_ did," the Swedish pirate took over, ridiculously prim. "As a team. Like sponsoring a dog, but we chose to sponsor children instead."

Joe's shoulders relaxed. "Oh, like they're here for one of those mentor programs, or-"

"No, like we legally adopted them and they're ours now."

Joe's shoulders hiked right back up.

"The _team_ adopted _kids_?"

Maybe he was more concussed than he'd thought, and he was actually unconscious right now and this was all a bad concussion dream. That would actually make even more sense than anything else had.

The pirate looked offended. "Don't say it like you aren't involved, you agreed to this too. It was a team decision. If a team can care for a dog, why can't we care for children?"

"Because they're fucking kids!"

"Language!" someone scolded, while at the same time the guy who'd made fun of Joe's hair grumbled, "You're a fucking kid."

"They say it takes a village," the goalie with the beard said congenially.

It sounded fucking unhinged, is what it sounded like, but Joe's whole life right now felt far too unhinged for him to worry about where those kids came from.

"Okay, but why did you get two? And why would you get one who can't understand half the team?"

"It was kind of like picking toppings on a pizza," said the guy with too much beard and too few teeth. "We got a bunch of North Americans, got a bunch of Swedes. Some people want one thing, some want the other. We figured, hey, why not get one of each?"

"Besides," the pirate tacked on, "Would you turn down these beautiful children?"

Joe looked down at Kevin in his lap, steadfastly trying to stuff his entire fist into his mouth while holding onto his foot with his other hand. A steady stream of drool was dripping from his fist onto Joe's jeans.

He looked back up at the Swedish pirate.

The pirate grimaced. "No, look at- the other one, look at him."

Marcus was admittedly cute, snuggling into Joe's shoulder, mussing up his blonde hair as he did. When he caught Joe looking at him he smiled, sunshine happy.

"Now see, how could we turn that down?"

It was stupid and it made absolutely no sense, but the next few minutes didn't make any sense either.

The children stayed with different teammates all the time, and tonight they were going home with "Burnzie," who was apparently the guy who looked homeless, and that was why one of those elusive equipment managers appeared with a few bags from Target because Burnzie didn't have any stuff at his house yet.

And Joe, by function of having a concussion and not remembering anything, had to go home with Burnzie too, because supposedly they were very good friends and Burnzie would be the best choice to help "jog his memory." When Joe said that he felt fine and that he wanted to see where he'd been staying, Pavs had gotten that pinched look around his eyes.

"Brauner's going to pick up some of your stuff and bring it over later," he said, gesturing to a man with curly hair and a quiet smile.

Nobody would explain how Joe had been surviving just fine on his own without any evident memory problems until he got to the rink today, and the concussion was clearly not new because he wasn't noticing any of the physical symptoms. But Joe wasn't allowed to watch tv or use a computer because apparently the doctors thought he was still photosensitive, but they'd also all left for the day so Joe couldn't talk to them about it.

"You actually did talk to them," said the guy with tired eyes, who had been introduced as Eddie. He smiled apologetically. "This morning, but it sounds like you don't remember."

Joe had stopped cold, felt his heart rate kick up, pure horror slicing through his veins. He probably would have started panicking if a small hand hadn't wrapped around his index finger and tugged insistently.

"Joe, up!" Kevin demanded, eyes already narrowed like he was deciding exactly how loudly he wanted to scream if Joe refused.

Dazed, Joe scooped him into his arms. Kevin settled against his shoulder with a satisfied huff and crammed his thumb in his mouth. Joe was pretty sure that wasn't good for a kid his age, especially one who'd rubbed his hand over half the room, but he wasn't willing to fight it right now.

He functioned on autopilot after that, letting a flurry of introductions – reintroductions, or possibly re-reintroductions – wash over him, only probably retaining a third of the names and faces. He let Pavs and Burnzie herd him out of the dressing room, still carrying Kevin. When he felt a tug on his shirt, Marcus was there at his side, one hand fisted in the hem of Joe's shirt and the other wrapped in Burnzie's own giant hand.

They trailed through the building like that, a series of mismatched ducklings, through twisting hallways and doors all branded with the San Jose Sharks logo. Joe had never been to San Jose Arena seeing as he missed the California road trip in the fall, so he wouldn't have recognized it on sight, but part of him relaxed when he was able to see physical proof that yes, he really was in a hockey arena just like any other one he'd been to, and he hadn't just been kidnapped by a bunch of freaks pretending to be a hockey team.

He got caught up by one of the logos painted on a wall. "Is this new?"

While Joe was by no means an expert on the Sharks, he could have sworn their logo didn't used to look like that. He wasn't sure what exactly was different but he was sure something was off.

When he looked away from the wall and back towards Pavs and Burnzie, they were giving each other some sort of weird side-eyed expressions.

"Uh, yeah," Pavs said slowly. "New this season, we rebranded over the summer. I guess you wouldn't know, you didn't come here in the fall and you don't remember anything about the, ah, trade."

Joe grimaced and looked away, or he would have, if Kevin hadn't smacked him in the face again. "What?" he groused.

Kevin had a pretty impressive glare for a kid that small. "_Joe_."

"_What?_"

Whatever it was that Kevin wanted to express, he appeared frustrated that Joe wasn't going to divine it from the intonation of his voice alone, and he refused to say more, slumping in Joe's arms like a warm, bony sack of potatoes. His arms around Joe's neck were mildly choking, but there wasn't a good way to tell a toddler that, so Joe kept his mouth shut, too.

The rest of the trip to the parking lot was relatively uneventful. Burnzie – who was apparently also named Brent in his spare time – kept up a cheerful narration of every area they passed, but Joe knew he had no chance of remembering it all. He was too busy wondering if this had all happened before – how many times he'd taken this tour and forgotten. At least the once, when he first came to the team, but then, if what they'd said was right and he was forgetting things even within a day-

"_Kom igen, _Joe." Marcus tugged on his shirt.

Joe hadn't even realized he'd stopped walking, so lost in his thoughts that he'd completely spaced out. His face flushed red and he tried to ignore the looks that the others were sending his way. They were probably used to him doing this. He couldn't stand the thought of seeing their pity.

He kept his head down for the rest of the trip to the car, finding it easier to focus on the weight of Kevin in his arms, the gentle tug of Marcus's hand on his shirt. Joe didn't pay much attention to Burnzie's car, other than to note that it was big and shiny and must have been ridiculously expensive, because Joe hadn't seen a car that looked like that before. That, and some of the European kids were standing around it, struggling to install car seats.

"Joe!" cheered the smiley one who looked younger than Joe himself. He looked like he'd probably try to hug Joe if Joe hadn't been holding a toddler, as if he hadn't just hugged Joe twenty minutes ago when he'd introduced himself (and Joe had promptly forgotten his name again). "We make car ready for you!"

He stepped back and waved with a flourish at the interior of the car, where two car seats had been set up. Joe had never put in a car seat before, but he had a feeling they weren't supposed to look quite like that.

Clearly Burnzie agreed because he made a face and told the smiley guy to "watch the kids" while he tried to wrestle the bigger seat into a less precarious position. The smiley guy took that with a bit too much sincerity, because he was hovering well within Joe's personal space bubble, rocking back and forth on his heels with his hands behind his back like it was the only way he could keep himself from reaching out and touching.

"I don't actually need to be watched," Joe said when the silence dragged on for too long. The silence, and the staring. The guy just kept watching him with that big, happy grin, like Joe was both fascinating and delightful at the same time. "I'm not actually a kid."

One of the other European guys, the one with the intensely shaped eyebrows, muttered something that sounded rather disparaging under his breath in another language. Joe reflexively took a step back, hiking Kevin up further on his hip. He was no stranger to chirping teammates, but a lot of the guys had been muttering about him this past hour, and he couldn't help but wonder how happy they were to even have him on this team.

The Bruins had been. Fine. There was only so nice you could be to the first overall pick who got injured in training camp and then entered the season late and couldn't fucking score. The first overall pick who was a healthy scratch more often than not, who the coach clearly didn't trust to do jack shit. Someone on the Habs had once told him that he made the rest of the fourth line look like All Stars and you weren't supposed to listen to chirps from other teams but the words still stuck in his head now, months later.

There was no reason to believe that a trade would make him more well-liked, especially when they'd have had to lose someone in exchange for him.

Speaking of...

"Who – um, who was I traded for?"

Kevin had a few fingers stuck in his mouth but his head was settled contentedly on Joe's shoulder, and Joe didn't mean to hold Kevin in front of him like a shield but if Kevin insisted on being in his arms, Joe was going to use whatever was in his arsenal. These guys very well may not have actually liked him that much, even if the smiley one looked like he'd never heard of the word hate before.

Everybody froze, and even the smiley one looked a little troubled. The only one who didn't react was the one leaning against the car with his arms crossed; he'd yet to say anything but the way he watched Joe made him feel pinned down and flayed open in the worst way.

"Uh..."

There was a sinking pit in Joe's stomach. "It wasn't – they didn't trade Marleau for me, right?"

It wasn't that Boston wouldn't have loved to have Marleau – more that Joe and Marleau were clearly not the same caliber of player. It was a losing deal for the Sharks for sure.

The uncomfortable expressions were more than enough answer.

Joe shouldn't have felt so upset over it. It didn't matter who he was traded for – it was bad enough that he was traded at all, that he'd been so bad that the coach had just lost all hope in his ability to improve. But he figured the Bruins had to be thrilled, to correct the mistake they'd made at the draft.

He swallowed the lump in his throat. "Why would they even make that trade? What, did the Bruins give up draft picks to get rid of me or something?"

The guy with the eyebrows made a face. "...Yes?"

It made sense – it was Joe who brought it up to begin with – but it still stung like a punch to the gut, leaving him winded and nauseous. He shifted his grip on Kevin, trying to ground himself in the weight of drowsy toddler in his arms and not completely spiral off into the panic attack building in his chest – or that insidious burning behind his eyes.

He looked at the ground, watched as Marcus poked at the grass at the edge of the parking lot.

"What – um, what month even is it?" He hated how thick his voice sounded, how weak. They must have already formed their opinions of him but he wished he wasn't constantly validating them.

Then again, he was so fucked up he didn't know what month it was, so he really couldn't get much lower in their eyes, could he?

"It's late March," Burnzie said, finally coming around the car from where he'd been fixing the second car seat. He was smiling, unashamedly showing off the gap in his teeth. "You came to us at the trade deadline."

It made sense – Joe didn't know much about California weather other than that it was way warmer than Ontario or Massachusetts, so he couldn't make any guesses based off of the weather, but nobody had mentioned playoffs and last he'd known it had been February, approaching the deadline.

It made sense, but it also meant Joe had missed at least a month – or was missing, continually, multiple times a day.

He felt frozen in place, watching as Burnzie scooped Marcus into his arms, growling playfully and sending Marcus into delighted peels of laughter. The kid seemed perfectly comfortable as Burnzie carted him to the car and got him settled in the seat, talking to him the whole time, and it made sense that this kid must have felt pretty safe with the team, even if he didn't speak English and also hadn't been to this guy's house before?

Joe could feel a headache coming on; maybe he did still have physical symptoms of the concussion.

"When did I get concussed?" He was afraid to even ask, but if he was going to make sense of this he needed a timeline.

Burnzie leaned back out of the car, squinted at Joe a little bit. "Uh, not too long after you got here. You've been out a few weeks."

He made some sort of face at the European kids, something Joe couldn't interpret, and the smiley one nodded with big eyes. "Yes, very concussed, memory is very gone, it's bad."

That did absolutely nothing to assuage Joe's fears, nor did the way that the terrifying one just said something in a foreign language, staring at Joe with his dead eyes but definitely not talking to him. The smiley one barked something back in the same language, looking more serious than Joe had seen him yet.

"I think that's enough of that," Burnzie said. "Joe, can you come get Kevin settled?"

It was clearly meant to be a diversion, but Joe was relieved for it, ducking his head and stepping past the other guys to get to the car. Kevin fussed a little when Joe tried to settle him in the car seat. "Noooo," he mumbled sleepily, fist tugging insistently on the collar of Joe's t-shirt.

"Kev, you gotta let him go," Burnzie said in an impossibly gentle voice that Joe couldn't ever hope to match. "We can't go home until you get buckled in."

Kevin certainly wasn't happy about it, but he seemed too lethargic to keep fighting. Joe let Burnzie coach him through buckling up the car seat.

"You're good at this for a guy who didn't have any of this sh- stuff in his car already," Joe said.

Burnzie shrugged. "Kids are easy. You play a game for a living, you never really grow up, right?"

He winked, tongue poking just the tiniest bit between his tooth gap, like it was something unconscious. Joe didn't know why it made his face turn red, but he ducked his head, letting his hair cover his eyes just a bit. "So, um, are we ready"?

It wasn't difficult to tell that Burnzie was laughing at him a little bit when he said, "Yeah, we can go." It didn't seem like it was malicious, but Joe still couldn't look him in the eye – or any of them, for that matter, seeing as he threw himself in the passenger seat of the car without saying goodbye to anyone. He wondered after the door was shut if he should be saying goodbye – it would be more polite, certainly – but then he figured that he didn't know their names and they hadn't seemed to like him that much anyway, so it probably didn't really matter.

Burnzie's car must have been expensive as hell, because the soundproofing was amazing. He couldn't hear what Burnzie was saying to the other guys, but his face looked uncharacteristically serious. Grimacing, Joe looked away, drummed his fingers over his lap.

The dashboard was taken up by a big screen of some type, like the car had a built-in tv or something. He leaned in to try to examine it a bit more when Marcus called out, "Joe, _jag är uttråkad_."

Obviously despite how short a time Joe had been here, the kid knew Joe's name and was more than comfortable using it often, but Joe still didn't know Swedish.

"Uh..." He looked over his shoulder at Marcus, slumped in his car seat with his head lolled to the side, the universal sign of a listless child. "I don't know..."

"_Jag vill ha musik_."

Joe recognized _music_ and looked at the car's controls again. Burnzie still had the keys, but Joe wasn't sure he'd be able to figure this out even if the car was turned on, because he couldn't see the radio controls anywhere on the dash.

"Um...Burnzie can do that?"

Did the kids call everyone by hockey nicknames? He had no clue, but he also had no clue how a hockey team was supposed to be communally raising children. No part of this plan sounded good or healthy, but then, nobody was really interested in Joe's opinion.

He was impossibly relieved when Burnzie got into the car. "Marcus wants music," he proudly reported, before Burnzie could even get his seatbelt fastened.

Burnzie smirked and started the car. Music blasted to life when the car turned on, something loud and country-sounding.

"_Nej!_" Marcus whined from the backseat, and Joe was relieved that one of the kids complained so that he didn't have to. When he looked over his shoulder, Kevin was completely unconscious, thumb shoved in his mouth, but Marcus was kicking his feet restlessly.

"You kids don't have any taste," Burnzie tsked, but he touched the screen on the dashboard and the music flipped to some anonymous pop music. Marcus immediately perked up and started bouncing in his seat.

Joe was too distracted by the screen. "Is that, like – a touch screen? For a car?"

He'd only ever seen them on the news, and definitely not for a car. But he'd also never seen a car with a screen.

Burnzie was quiet for a moment, letting the music fill the silence as he backed out of his parking space. "Uh, yeah. Premium models, y'know?"

Joe absolutely did not know, but he still drove his dad's hand-me-down Honda Accord that was over ten years old. His dad had warned him against running out and buying a fancy car in his rookie year, and it was apparently worth it, because he didn't have a clue what was going to happen to his career.

"Hey, did I get a chance to bring my car from Boston?" he asked. "Like, um, have it sent over here?"

He wasn't sure how to define Burnzie's expression, some sort of quizzical squint. "Ah, no, I don't think so. And with the, uh, concussion, you've just been catching rides with everyone."

It made sense – but nothing else did.

"But I haven't always been staying with you," Joe said. It wasn't a question, but Burnzie hummed in agreement.

"No. We thought it would be...easier, for you to stay with the kids and whoever they were staying with."

Joe's face burned as he faced out the window, watching the unfamiliar sunny landscape filter past. It definitely looked like what he'd picture for California, sans the actual beaches. He could tell himself it was the sunlight making his face feel so hot and not the fact that he was being lumped in with literal children, a burden on his teammates who couldn't care for himself.

"I've been concussed for a few weeks," he said slowly. Burnzie made an affirmative noise. "But I'm...I still forget things. Every day? Like, is it multiple times a day?"

He didn't like how slow Burnzie was to respond. "Uh...it's been getting better."

Anxiety clenched tight around Joe's heart, squeezing his ribs. "Really? Because I can't remember anything past the last hour or two, but I was concussed weeks ago, and people said I keep forgetting things like this has happened before, and everyone seems to know so much about my life and I don't remember anything since Boston and I don't know who anyone is or what the fuck is happening and I feel like I'm in a fucking nightmare but I can't wake up and-"

"Hey, hey." Joe didn't notice that they must have pulled over until Burnzie's hands were on him, unbuckling Joe's seatbelt and hauling Joe into his arms. It was awkward, hunched over the console between the seats, his face mashed awkwardly against Burnzie's shoulder. Burnzie's immense beard was tickling Joe's face but he couldn't make himself move, not when Burnzie was rubbing a hand up and down his back, warm and firm.

"C'mon, you're okay," Burnzie hummed, and Joe felt those damnable tears return again, this time because he was so achingly reminded of his mom.

"Can I call my mom?" He wanted to die when he heard how watery his voice came out, not that things could have been much worse, when this man who was purportedly his teammate was having to rock him like a child. Immediately he cringed.

"Or, it's okay if I can't. I know it's long-distance, but I just- I can pay you back for it?"

Suddenly that's all he wanted, to talk to his mom, to have her tell him that this was all real and that it was okay, that things were going to get better and that he would remember. Ridiculously, he wanted her to just say that she could come take him home – because if he was like this, a shivering mess in a city he didn't know surrounded by people he didn't remember, then he couldn't play hockey, and if he couldn't play hockey then what was even the point?

"Uh...yeah, sure. We'll, uh, we'll talk about it once we get settled in at home." Burnzie started to pull back and Joe all but threw himself out of Burnzie's arms, not wanting to be seen as clinging. He fumbled to replace his seatbelt and tried to ignore the way that Marcus was watching with keen interest from the backseat.

"_Okej?_" Marcus asked.

Joe grimaced at his lap, rubbed a hand over his face. "Yeah, okay."

He steadfastly ignored Burnzie's eyes on him, refused to look up until Burnzie was settled back in his own seat and pulling away from the curb.

"You're gonna be okay, Joe," Burnzie said quietly. "This won't last forever. We'll – we're gonna figure this out. We'll get you back to normal."

That was an easy thing to say when you weren't the guy whose head was so impossibly fucked up that you couldn't remember your own life.

Burnzie's home was huge and sprawling and utterly unfamiliar. It was clearly new to the kids too, because Marcus's face was pressed to the window as best as he could get from his booster seat. The house was in an intimidatingly nice looking neighborhood, but it had its own long, meandering driveway that set it back from the road, gave it more land. Joe couldn't imagine what one guy would need that much land for, but it definitely seemed like what a professional athlete could afford.

"_Vad är det här? Är det här du bor?_"

"Uh..." Joe turned to Burnzie, watched as he pulled up to the house and turned the car off. "Do you know what he's...?"

"What? Oh, no." Burnzie's laugh was loud and raucous, enough that Joe could see the crinkles around his eyes. "I don't speak Swedish."

From the sounds behind them, Kevin was waking up in the back, starting to squirm in his seat. Marcus said something to him, also in Swedish, and also entirely unintelligible.

Joe couldn't help but ask, "How long have you guys had him, then? If he doesn't understand you and you don't understand him?"

For a moment Burnzie paused with one hand on the door, like he was halfway through exiting the car. Then his face smoothed into an easy smile, showing off the gap in his teeth. "Not too long. About as long as we've had you."

He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him, going around to the back to free Marcus. Joe sat there, staring at his empty seat, until Kevin's plaintive voice came from the backseat.

"Joe? Joe, up! Joe!"

Joe didn't know much about childhood speech development, but he was starting to think that Kevin didn't really need to form a vocabulary when he was already making such versatile use of Joe's name.

Sighing, he got out of the car and came around to the back. Burnzie was murmuring something to Marcus as he scooped him out of the car, and even if he didn't understand it, Marcus started giggling.

Kevin, on the other hand, looked extremely grumpy after his nap and was making grabby hands for Joe before the door was even open.

"Joe!" he barked warningly, far more disparaging than a toddler should have been able to achieve.

"Yeah, yeah."

It took a moment to figure out the buckles on the car seat; during that time Kevin busied himself with kicking his feet at Joe and doing his damnedest to pull at his hair. When he was finally freed he all but threw himself into Joe's arms, squirming and making sure to elbow him in the jaw in the process.

Apparently they were close, despite Kevin having only known Joe for a few weeks and Joe having only known Kevin for a few hours.

"Uh, Burnzie?" It felt weird saying the name out loud, a nickname for someone he barely knew. "I just realized, Kevin doesn't have shoes?"

Burnzie was pulling the shopping bags from the trunk of the car, balancing Marcus in his other arm like it was nothing. His biceps didn't even look like they were straining, and Joe made himself look away before he got too distracted trying to decipher the tattoos.

"Oh, yeah, neither does Marcus," Burnzie said, like it was normal for the kids to be shoeless and wearing pajamas in the middle of the day. "They, uh, got into some stuff this morning and ruined their clothes. That's why they're in pajamas, it's all we could get in the gift shop that included pants. We got slippers on Marcus but Kevin's a rebel and won't let us put anything on his feet."

Sure enough, when Joe looked, Marcus was wearing little child-sized Sharks slippers, the kind with an elastic back to keep them from falling off.

Joe looked at Kevin, squirming in his arms like he couldn't decide if he wanted to be held or put down, and then cast an assessing glance at the house.

"And...why do you guys think it's a good idea to keep passing little kids between a bunch of houses? Don't they need like, stability and sh- stuff? And like. Child-proofing?"

It was mildly fascinating, the way that Burnzie's back straightened and his eyes went wide.

"Oh, fuck."

Marcus started giggling again, and Burnzie looked down at him, saying, "Don't you go repeating that. Don't you dare tell Erik I'm teaching you bad words in English, even if he says worse every day about himself."

That made Marcus laugh even harder, and Joe was sure he didn't understand one bit of it.

"Soooo...that's a no?"

Burnzie grimaced and slammed the trunk closed before hefting his bags and heading towards the house. "Uh, not as such. I mean, I don't have any like, super dangerous things for kids to get into – well, as long as they don't go in the garage. We have to make sure they don't get into the garage."

Well now Joe wanted to know what was in the garage.

"But like...baby gates, for stairs?" Marcus would probably be fine, but Kevin seemed the type to decide to go exploring at night and take a header down a flight of stairs.

Right as he was about to unlock his front door, Burnzie froze up again.

"Uh. We're just gonna do a really, really good job of watching them."

Joe hadn't thought it was possible, but his anxiety was actually getting worse.

It continued when they walked into the house. Kevin immediately clipped Joe in the jaw with his elbow while yelling, "Joe!" in a clear substitute for asking to be put down. The minute he was out of Joe's arms he was gone, which Joe felt a lot more concerned about than Burnzie. Marcus was off too, and Joe could hear them moving around in another room. Joe was still stuck in the front hall, staring up the large, very-unsafe-for-children staircase.

"C'mon," Burnzie called, taking the shopping bags down the hall to what was quite possibly the nicest kitchen Joe had ever seen in his life. The appliances were all metal, the countertop was stone, and everything was sleek and polished and nothing like the cramped apartment Joe lived in back in Boston, with its scratched Formica counters and elderly white fridge that made suspicious rattling noises at night. Investing in a nicer place to live was another thing had dad had advised him against doing until he was sure he was staying somewhere, but Joe wasn't sure he'd be able to afford a place this nice even if he wanted to.

"You, uh, have a lot of expensive stuff," Joe said, peering at some sort of digital screen on the fridge itself.

"Not really," Burnzie said as he started unpacking the bags. He looked up at Joe and sort of froze, for just a second, just long enough for it to be conspicuous, and then he hurried on, "I mean, you should see Timo, now _that's_ a guy with expensive tastes."

"Who's Timo?"

Burnzie made a face. "He was helping get the kids' seats in the car? The one with the perfect hair and the eyebrows?"

Oh.

The one who probably didn't think very much of Joe. Not that most of his team likely did right now.

Desperate for a change of subject, Joe's eyes roved around the kitchen, feeling more and more like he'd entered a foreign land with each passing second. "Um, you said I could use the phone?"

Burnzie was squinting at a pair of children's pants like he wasn't quite sure what to do with them. "Yeah. So, I was thinking, maybe it would be best if we had you call from the arena tomorrow? They've got a really good international plan, it would probably just be easier."

It sounded reasonable, but Burnzie didn't look at Joe once when he spoke, and for some reason that set him even more on edge. But there wasn't a visible landline in the kitchen for Joe to use, so it wasn't like he could really argue right now. Maybe it was in the living room.

But spending the night here without speaking to a single person he knew also made him feel sick to his stomach.

"Oh. I mean, if that's what you want." It was Burnzie's phone, after all. "I just..."

He was just every bit the child they thought he was and desperately wanted to speak to his mom. He was just terrified out of his mind and felt like he'd lost touch with everything he'd ever known.

He was just homesick and heartsick and wanted to play hockey.

"Hey."

Joe startled when Burnzie's hand landed on his shoulder, but Burnzie was unperturbed, smile soft and welcoming. The lack of teeth was starting to get less surprising now, with how much Burnzie smiled.

"You're gonna be fine, man. Like I said, we're gonna work this out. You just have to hang out for a bit while we manage this."

"Manage what?" The words spilled out of Joe's mouth before he could stop them. "My head being fucked up? Who knows if it will ever get better?"

Burnzie squeezed his shoulder, and Joe felt grounded under his warm hand. It was hard to really start to get caught up in his thoughts with Burnzie right there, watching Joe with gentle eyes. He had freckles, Joe realized, all across the bridge of his nose. It was kind of distracting.

He ducked his head, suddenly unable to handle the earnestness of Burnzie's gaze.

"I'll get better." Burnzie's grip was firm, like he didn't notice Joe's embarrassment or just didn't care. "I promise. This won't take long."

Joe didn't know how he could be so sure about something like a head injury, but the confidence was admittedly reassuring.

"Joe!" Kevin screamed from somewhere else in the house.

Burnzie laughed when he saw Joe's expression. "I think you're being paged. How about you go look after the monsters and I'll put an early dinner together?"

It was the first time that Joe had really considered what time of day it was – apparently his fiasco and ensuing meltdown at practice had taken them all right through lunchtime. Fuck, the kids were probably starving.

Joe spent the rest of the evening feeling like he'd just stepped into an alternate universe where everything was fancy and high-tech and he was also a permanent babysitter. Even his bedroom was kind of intimidating, with some type of ultra-thin television mounted on the dresser that Joe was itching to mess around with.

"Is that a plasma screen tv?" Joe asked.

Burnzie paused for a moment and did that squinty thing he seemed to do when he was puzzled. "What? Oh! Uh, yeah, it's, uh, new. Don't touch it, doctor's orders."

He winked at Joe, but he still took the remote with him.

Kevin and Marcus were being set up in the same bedroom, right next door to Joe's. They were thrilled with the size of the queen bed they'd be sharing, which they displayed by jumping all over it until they bounced into each other and Kevin started crying.

"Joe!" he wailed, face turning alarmingly red. Did kids not breathe when they cried? "Joe, hurts!"

So Joe ended up having to try to bounce a snotty, screaming Kevin in his arms while making sure that no, he wasn't actually injured, but he was probably overtired and a knock on the head didn't help things.

"Don't jump on the bed," Joe told Marcus.

"_Jag vill ha glass_," Marcus said, blinking owlishly at him.

Joe offered him a clean pair of pajamas to change in to.

They were getting by.

The kids were a good distraction, because kids were kids no matter the bizarro world you woke up in. Joe was still more than a little concerned for the origins of these kids, and for how a hockey team came to have them and who approved of this idea, but it wasn't like he could ask Kevin about where he came from, and Marcus couldn't understand him.

But they liked the chicken nuggets that Burnzie made them, and they were enthralled with the Dr. Seuss book that Burnzie handed Joe. "Go read to them, it's good for their brains."

Joe wanted to make a remark about what was good for his brain, when it was evidently so damaged he couldn't function on his own anymore, let alone play hockey, but he resisted only because Kevin and Marcus were watching him with eerie stares.

Surprising nobody, the kids did not go to bed very easily. Kevin was clearly groggy, eyes slipping shut and stuffing his thumb in his mouth again, but he got fussy whenever anyone tried to tuck him in and leave the room. And Marcus, despite having a nightlight plugged in, became extremely panicked when the light was turned off.

"_Det finns något under sängen!_" he yelled, looking more upset than Joe had seen him all day; unlike Kevin, he had been pretty unflappable so far, even though he couldn't understand them, but the lights being turned off was his last straw, apparently.

"Uh..." Joe looked to Burnzie, wondering if he could just like. Pass the baton and tap out of this one. Burnzie shot him a grim smile and nodded towards the door.

"It's okay, go get ready for bed, I'll handle this."

The digital clock on the bedside table said that it was barely eight at night, late for a toddler but extremely early for an adult NHL player.

Except Joe was barely either of those things, in reality or in the eyes of his teammates, and he honestly was kind of tired. It's not like he had anything better to do, seeing as he wasn't allowed to watch tv. He bet his Game Boy was in with whatever belongings he'd brought from Boston, but then, he didn't know where his belongings were and he wasn't allowed to use a screen anyways.

He didn't really try to go to bed, but he was bored and kind of tired, and apparently that was enough to outweigh his ever-present anxiety about his unfamiliar surroundings.

For a second time that day, Joe didn't remember falling asleep, but he remembered waking up. This time, it was to the sound of his door cracking open. The bedroom was dark; Burnzie must have checked on him and turned the lights off, and Joe felt embarrassed to imagine it happening, Burnzie finding him passed out with the lights on like a little kid up past their bedtime.

Speaking of, the hallway was dimly lit, probably another nightlight, but it was just enough to reveal two small silhouettes in the doorway.

"Joe!" Kevin not-so-quietly whispered.

Moments later, two small pairs of feet were scampering across the room right before the bed jostled and Kevin's bony, bony elbows planted themselves in Joe's chest.

"Joe!" he hissed into Joe's face. He batted at Joe's cheek for good measure, shifting his weight on Joe's chest, and Joe had to act then to make sure that Kevin didn't kick him somewhere he'd regret.

"What's wrong?" he mumbled. Unsurprisingly, Marcus was climbing into the bed on his other side, making a point of settling himself beneath the covers before inching closer until he could curl up at Joe's side.

"Monsters!" Kevin whispered urgently. Or, it sounded like he said monsters, but he kind of left off the second half of the word. Enunciation was evidently not Kevin's strong suit.

Joe was strongly tempted to just roll over and go back to sleep, but he didn't think that would make them go away.

"Uh. Would sleeping here make you feel better?" It was easier than trying to play monster exterminator in the middle of the night.

Kevin nodded very seriously and crammed half his hand in his mouth. Joe took it upon himself to settle Kevin on his other side before Kevin did it and left more bruises in his wake.

It was kind of weird, trying to sleep with two little squirmy furnaces on either side of him, but it wasn't the worst thing Joe had ever experienced. He'd probably have a lot more opinions about this in the morning. Until then, he could handle this.

He was just about to drift off again when his eyes shot open.

"Are you guys wearing pull-ups or something, or...?"

The kids slept peacefully. Joe, not so much.

Burnzie thought it was absolutely adorable when he found them all sharing a bed the next morning.

"I was a little worried about what the boys might have gotten in to when they weren't in their room," Burnzie said. He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe, giving them that toothless smile.

Joe cleared his throat and looked away, focusing on Kevin, who was presently...drooling on his chest, great.

"They showed up here in the middle of the night. Kevin said there were monsters. Then he kneed me in the bladder and apparently drooled all over me."

"Oh yeah, speaking of that, I don't think he's really potty trained."

Joe had never tried to fling himself away from a child so quickly; of course, in the process, he ended up disturbing Marcus, who mumbled something sleepy and Swedish and the way he rubbed his eyes would have been adorable if Joe wasn't patting down his front to see if he was damp.

"You don't _think_?"

"It's my first time having him overnight," Burnzie said. He wasn't nearly as concerned about touching Kevin, untangling him from the sheets and scooping him up, ignoring how Kevin started whining as he was woken up. "And he's like, just over two. So if he's had any practice with a toilet, he's probably not very good at it."

He kind of sniffed at Kevin, which is something that Joe would never, ever willingly do, and from his face the answer was evident. "Yep, okay, c'mon, Kev, let's get you washed up."

Burnzie walked off with Kevin, trying to talk up the idea of a bath and Kevin clearly wanting no part of it.

Joe cast a wary look at Marcus.

"You're what, five? Six? You know how to hold it, right?"

Marcus yawned. "_Vad blir det till frukost?_"

At least the kid seemed sort of self-sufficient, because he took himself to the en-suite bathroom off of Joe's room without assistance. It even sounded like he washed his hands when he was done, so he was probably better at this than Joe was at his age.

Fifteen minutes later found Joe and Marcus scrounging around Burnzie's kitchen for anything that looked edible. It was a difficult quest, because Burnzie seemed to have a disturbing lack of children's cereals on hand, which was a problem because that was what both Marcus and Joe wanted to eat.

Well. Joe wanted it, but he was pretty sure Marcus would eat it, too.

There was a painful amount of granola and weird health foods and very little that looked processed or kid-friendly. The hunks of raw meat in the fridge were promising for dinner, but did not bode well for breakfast.

"_Kan du göra pannkakor snälla?_" Marcus asked.

Joe parsed enough to pick out something like pancakes, and he grimaced. "Kid, unless there's a mix around, we're shit out of luck. Shit, I mean – don't say shit."

Marcus helpfully said nothing.

It was a relief when Burnzie came in, carrying Kevin upside down by his ankles. Kevin, for his part, looked quite content with this. He was only wearing one sock, and his fluffy dark hair looked kind of damp, so bathtime and clean clothes had apparently been an adventure.

Speaking of...

"Hey man, are there like, any clothes I can borrow?" Joe asked. He'd slept in his clothes from last night, sans the jeans, but to be honest those didn't fit him that great, either. The length was right, but all of his clothes were hanging baggy on him. It felt like when he was a kid and his mom would buy him clothes that were huge and insist that he'd grow into them eventually so it was a good purchase. Or worse, when she'd make him wear his brothers' hand-me-downs that were equally gigantic.

"Oh, yeah, let me check the front porch, Brauner might have dropped some stuff off last night."

Kevin was unceremoniously flipped upright and dumped into Joe's arms; he giggled delightedly, smacking at Joe's face none-too-gently. "Joe! Joe, bath!"

He kind of butchered the word "bath" but the intent was there, and Kevin was apparently a child who enjoyed baths because something about the bath made him break out into fresh peals of laughter. It would have been cute if he didn't keep trying to stick his hand in Joe's mouth.

"Oh, wow, cool, buddy, you're nice and clean!" Joe was sure that it wouldn't last long, just because he got the feeling that Kevin was the type of kid who disappeared within seconds once he was placed on the floor.

Just for that, he held Kevin a bit tighter until Burnzie came in with a duffle bag – Sharks teal, with number nineteen on the end.

"Is that his bag?" Joe asked.

"What? No, it's yours."

DiMaio had nineteen in Boston; it was Joe's favorite number – Yzerman's number – but he hadn't considered that maybe it would be available when he came to San Jose. For the first time since this all started, he felt a frisson of excitement.

"Oh. Cool."

He put Kevin down, trusting that Burnzie could watch him while he tried to get something together for breakfast, and went over to the bag. Hoisting it over his shoulder, he told Burnzie, "You have no cereal, and I think Marcus wants pancakes."

Burnzie was already digging through his freezer, but he winked over his shoulder at Joe. "I think I can put something together."

Joe scampered upstairs before Burnzie could notice how red he was getting.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting – maybe that he'd open the bag and find something familiar and his whole memory would just snap back into place, all from a familiar t-shirt – but he didn't get it.

The clothes in the bag felt just as foreign as the clothes he was wearing – maybe more so, because they were not only conspicuously large, but branded in the Sharks logo. There were a lot of them, more than Joe would have expected the team to issue him in just a few weeks, and every single one looked at least a size too big.

"Fuck, did Mom tell them what size to get me?"

Even as he said it, he felt another spark of excitement that he would get to talk to his mom once they got to the rink. If something was fishy, she'd suss it out immediately and help him. God knows she'd been freaking out when he was injured in the preseason; there was no way she wasn't already all over this situation.

He found a pair of clothes that looked passable and changed quickly. Sadly after digging through the bag there was nothing much more there than clothes or toiletries – nothing really personal, nothing to give an indication of where he'd been living or what was going on.

Whatever. He'd find out today when he talked to his mom.

When Joe got back to the kitchen, Burnzie was trying to corral the kids to eat. Or rather, Marcus was happily eating a pancake with a side of bacon, while Kevin was sitting in Burnzie's lap and saw the best way to eat a pancake to be ripping pieces out of the middle and cramming them all in his mouth at the same time.

Joe thought about trying to help, just for a moment, before remembering that he was concussed and not a total idiot; instead he left Burnzie to it and made his own plate.

The kids actually behaved themselves pretty well on the way to the arena.

"Remember," Burnzie said in the voice he used to talk to the kids, even though it really could only be for Joe's benefit. "It's a big arena and we can't have you guys wandering off. You can stay in the players' lounge until practice is done. Dilly and Erik picked up some coloring books and stuff for everyone to play with – and remember, no tv."

As thrilling as coloring for a few hours sounded, Joe wasn't that enthused. "I didn't see my Game Boy in my bag, do you know where that is?"

Burnzie muttered something along the lines of, "That fucking Game Boy," like he didn't think Joe could hear him. Louder he said, "No screens, you can have it back when the doctors say so."

"It's just Tetris and Pac-Man-"

"Flashing, moving pictures with lights and sounds, even worse. Tell you what, how about we all go out for a nice walk after practice?"

"_Kan jag köra nästa?_" Marcus asked.

"We're almost there, bud," Burnzie called.

Joe wasn't entirely sure that a walk with a toddler who wouldn't wear socks or shoes and a kid who didn't understand a single word they said would ever constitute as "nice," but he was pretty sure he wasn't actually being asked for his opinion.

They came around what must have been the back of the arena, because it was devoid of all the posters and signage that adorned the front of every other arena Joe had ever been to. He probably should have paid more attention to where they parked yesterday. Burnzie got the kids from the car, immediately forcing Joe to carry Kevin because Kevin had kicked off his shoes in the car.

"You can put him down when we get to the lounge," Burnzie said.

"When can I call my mom?"

Burnzie didn't look at him when he answered, too busy tugging Marcus by the hand across the parking lot.

"After practice, we'll do it from the coach's office."

Joe realized with a start that he actually didn't remember who San Jose's coach was. He figured he should probably know, if this was the guy he was trying to show that he was good enough for an NHL roster spot.

Well, he'd find out soon enough.

They took a bunch of back hallways, plain and a little dark, and missing the logos Joe remembered seeing yesterday, so he knew it was a different route. But they arrived at the dressing room just the same, and it was just as intimidating as Joe remembered – and already mostly full.

As soon as they stepped in the room, all eyes were on them. Or, Joe tried to tell himself that everyone was staring at the group of them.

It was easier than admitting to himself that everyone was watching him like a ticking bomb, waiting to see if he'd blow up like yesterday.

Joe ducked his head and kept his mouth shut. That's what his agent had told him to do, if he wanted to avoid being sent down after the awful season he'd been having.

He let Kevin slide to the floor when he began squirming, and Kevin immediately tossed himself face-first onto the Sharks logo in the middle of the dressing room.

If things had been silent before, then it was positively deathly now.

Kevin laid there spread-eagled in the middle of the floor, wriggling his arms and legs like he was making a snow angel and giggling profusely the whole time.

Someone was grinding their teeth watching him, and Joe wasn't sure he wanted to find out who.

"You can't kick him off the team if he's a toddler," someone said, clearly trying to sound reasonable.

"I sure as fuck can," someone else muttered.

Sighing, Joe stalked over to the center of the room and hoisted Kevin up by his ankles. Kevin was positively cackling, even as he wailed, "Joooooe, dooowwwnnn!"

Joe cleared his throat and looked at Burnzie. "You said there's somewhere you want us to wait?"

He could feel his shoulders relaxing as he followed Burnzie out of the room, even as a dozen gazes burned into his back.

The players' lounge was far nicer than the one Joe remembered back in Boston. It reminded him of Burnzie's house, sleek and full of metal appliances and dark woods. There were multiple fridges and multiple flat-screened televisions, and a variety of other electronics that Joe couldn't identify – especially when he peered closer and Burnzie bodily steered him away.

"Nope, don't even go there. You want to get better, we can't have you digging through that stuff, you'll fry your brain."

Joe doubted that was true, but he _did_ want to get better as fast as possible, even if that meant foregoing television.

He still wasn't super excited about coloring with the kids, but he gamely helped the boys open up their crayons and examine their coloring books for the best choices.

Marcus found some coloring book containing weird little hippos and was positively entranced, yelling, "_Mumintrollen, _Joe_!_ _Vilken är din favorit?_"

The only words Joe recognized were his own name and "favorite," and so he briefly perused the weird little book of weirder little creatures before selecting a hippo at random based solely on his hat.

"_Muminpappan_," Marcus said, sounding satisfied with Joe's choice.

Kevin's Hot Wheels coloring book made a lot more sense, Joe thought, but at least Marcus was happy.

One would have thought that Kevin would have had the briefest attention span for coloring, but surprisingly, or perhaps not so much, it was Joe. The kids seemed not too bothered by their general situation, but Joe couldn't stop thinking and looking and observing. Everyone acted like he couldn't watch them practice because he had to look after the kids, but it felt like a cop-out.

It felt like they were trying to keep something from him.

He searched the lounge, making sure he had the kids in sight at all times. They would look up every minute or so to make sure he was still in the room, or call out his name to hold up a picture for him to approve of, but otherwise they left him to his devices.

There was sadly nothing really of note in the lounge – or if there was, Joe wasn't able to identify it.

The fridges and cupboards were stuffed with sports drinks and protein powder and energy bars – normal shit. There were Tom Clancy books tossed on one of the tables that Joe swore were the same damn books that were dumped on the table in Boston – nobody ever read them, naturally, and yet they were always there.

The electronics near the televisions were of interest, but Joe couldn't make heads or tails of what they actually were – if they were video game consoles, he couldn't see where the cartridge went in, and they definitely didn't fit VHS tapes. After looking them over for a few minutes he gave up.

"Joe!" Marcus called. "_Jag är uttråkad! När får vi spela hockey?_"

Even though Joe only knew one of those words, he could relate.

"I know, buddy. I want to play hockey, too."

Maybe he could convince the team to let him out on the ice with the kids after practice was done. That would be more entertaining than any walk.

Joe was expecting Burnzie to be the first one back to deliver them from their boredom – by this time Marcus had moved on to trying to do a puzzle of the 101 Dalmatians that somebody had left for them, while Kevin seemed to have taken inspiration from his car coloring book and decided to be the car himself, edging along the walls while making car sounds and "crashing" himself into walls with spectacular fanfare. Joe was sitting on the couch, handing Marcus a puzzle piece because watching him try to put the same incorrect piece in for the past minute was killing him, when someone decidedly _not_ Burnzie came in.

"_Har du kul_?" the Swedish pirate asked. Marcus's head snapped up and he all but vaulted over the coffee table so he could get at the pirate, throwing himself around the guy's leg in a hug and then immediately trying to drag him to the table where they'd left their coloring so he could show him his hippo collection. Joe heard his name somewhere in the narration, but he wasn't really trying to pay attention until the pirate said, "Oh, Joe, you're a big Moominpappa fan I hear?"

"I have no clue what you're talking about," Joe said blankly, but the pirate looked smug as fuck anyways.

Kevin crashed into another wall; it was a bad one, if the explosion indicated anything.

Joe tried not to watch the door too closely, but also what the fuck, he just wanted to call his mom already.

A few other guys filtered in, all seeming to find the coloring pages to be particularly interesting. They doted on Marcus and Kevin a bit; the guy with the overly gelled hair made a point of scooping Kevin up in his arms and tickling his stomach until he curled up like a pill bug.

Nobody approached Joe, and Joe was starting to feel more and more like San Jose was definitely not that far removed from Boston. But then, being out on injury for so long had made him expendable to Boston; the Sharks would undoubtedly feel the same.

"Hey, do you know where a phone is so I can call my mom?" Joe asked, picking a guy at random as his victim.

The guy made a face, because nobody could talk to Joe without making a face, and said with some type of Scandinavian accent, "Uh, I think Burnzie and Pavs are helping with that, yeah?"

Joe made a point of looking around the room before looking back at him and saying, "Okay, well they aren't here, so..."

He knew he was being a bit of a dick, but he'd just been saddled with babysitting duty for hours, and nobody wanted to tell him a fucking thing, and even this guy looked kind of cowed to have Joe talk to him – and more than a little guilty. "Sorry," he said, "Just wait for them?"

The guy left before Joe could even respond.

He glanced around the room again. A group of guys were speaking Swedish with Marcus, who was absolutely soaking up the attention; it was probably good for him to be with people who knew his language, imagine that. And someone had pulled out a few actual racecars, which they were helping Kevin race across the table, so that was him taken care of, too.

In most arenas, the coach's office wasn't that far from the lounge, and it was typically very clearly labeled. It shouldn't be that hard for Joe to find and ask to borrow the phone himself.

Nobody noticed when he left the room. He wasn't sure if that made him feel better or worse.

There were staff members in the hallway, but they didn't pay Joe any mind. It was like his superpower, making people avoid eye contact or having to acknowledge him.

It did nothing to make him think they didn't have something to hide.

As predicted, it wasn't that hard to find the door marked "Peter DeBoer – Head Coach." Joe was drumming up the courage to knock – he didn't know this coach but had undoubtedly underwhelmed him already, and it was a pretty big favor to ask to borrow his phone – when he realized he could hear voices talking through the slightly-cracked door.

Burnzie and – Pavs?

"It's fucked up, man," Burnzie was saying, sounding like he was trying and failing to keep his voice down. "What we're doing – he thinks he's living in some sort of Memento bullshit, like he thinks he's forgetting and relearning everything every day. He's terrified and we're just making it worse."

The hallway was kind of hot, the type of stale heat that came from the poor circulation of being pseudo-underground in a building with a lot of machinery keeping its ice frozen.

But despite all of that, Joe felt so, so cold.

He'd always assumed that everyone was talking about him in Boston, but at least in Boston he'd never walked in on it happening. Especially not from a guy he was living with.

"I know," Pavs said, sounding exhausted. "I'm not – I don't know. There's not really a guidebook to this. I asked Patty, and he's gonna check in tomorrow before morning skate, see if he can figure out how to handle this. It's just – if we can keep him from asking too many questions-"

"Dude, all he does is ask questions, non-stop, all day. He's scared out of his mind and every tiny thing is unfamiliar. The tvs are different, the cars are different – he's not dumb, Pavs, he knows something's wrong, and the deeper we get with this the worse things are gonna get. He wanted to know who he got traded for and what the Bruins had to do to 'get rid of' him."

Pavs sighed. "Yeah, it's not – don't take it the wrong way, he had a bad rookie year. He doesn't talk about it much."

Had? Joe was _still having_ an atrocious year, thanks much, and it was only getting worse by the second as the feeling that he was being lied to ratcheted up from a "creeping suspicion" into "undeniable fact."

"He's not talking about it now," Burnzie was saying, "He's just – I can't even describe it. He doesn't really trust any of us. The kids are a good distraction but they only occupy him for so long. And I still don't get why the kids were included in all this."

"It's gotta be how he worded it. He must have said something to-"

"Can I help you, Joe?"

Joe nearly jumped out of his skin when a man appeared at his shoulder. His smile was blandly pleasant – the smile of a hockey coach.

Shit.

"I'm sorry, I just – they said I could use your phone to call Canada?"

The voices inside the office immediately went silent. The coach – Peter DeBoer? – narrowed his eyes for just a moment, like a facial twitch, and then he said, "Of course, come on in."

Pavs and Burnzie were watching with guarded expressions as Joe was ushered into the coach's office. The sound of the door clicking shut behind the coach made Joe want to crawl out of his skin.

The atmosphere wasn't exactly welcoming, but then again, they _had_ just been talking about Joe behind his back while he'd eavesdropped on them. It was bound to be uncomfortable.

"Hey, Joe. I was just going to come get you." Burnzie's voice was ridiculously soft, and his eyes were big and sincere, the way they got when he was talking to Kevin and trying to convince him to do something. Joe wished it could be comforting, but it just made his anxiety even worse – he knew it wasn't genuine, now.

Something was happening here, something big, having to do with Joe and his lack of memory and both Burnzie and Pavs were in on it, and they had the conversation in the coach's office, suggesting the coach was in on it too, and that would likely mean that the whole _team_ was in on it-

Joe's nails bit into the palm of his hand, bringing him back to the present.

He couldn't afford to freak out right now, not here, not in front of these people.

The only thing that he knew with absolute certainty was that this situation was not safe.

For a split second he debated the logistics of just bolting out of there, of trying to get help, but then, what would he even do? He didn't know where he was, didn't know his own address. What would the police do, when all he could say was that he had no memory but he thought the people who claimed to be closest to him might be lying? Nothing but laugh him out of the station, of course, and tell the press about what a freak the new rookie was on the Sharks.

His best bet would still be his mom, because if something fishy was going on, she would intervene.

"I just want to call my mom now," Joe said quietly, ignoring Burnzie's question.

The coach gestured towards his desk phone, one of the nicer ones, black and professional with a screen for caller ID. Using it meant Joe would have to sit in the coach's chair, and even though the coach seemed to be indicating that he expected Joe to sit in it, it still felt inappropriate, especially given his status with the team.

He sat down and waited, but nobody moved.

"Do you need help dialing?" Burnzie asked.

Joe tried very hard not to react the way he wanted to. "No, I was just expecting a bit of privacy."

"...Oh."

The coach was nice enough about stepping out of his own office, didn't really seem bothered at all, actually, but it was the other two who started to get shifty.

"Given the state of things, it might be best if we stay-" Pavs started to say.

Joe cut him off. "I'd like to be alone for a minute."

"Let's give Joe some space," the coach said from the doorway, and the other two only followed after exchanging more than a few Looks.

As soon as he heard the door latch shut, Joe couldn't dial fast enough. It was painful, listening to each ring and praying that his mom was home and wouldn't let it fall to voicemail. But the moment the call connected and Joe heard his mom's voice, he felt so relieved he nearly cried.

"Hello?"

"Mom! Mom, it's me, oh my God." It was a struggle to contain himself, to get his voice down to normal speaking tones when all he wanted to do was yell and ramble and get rid of the growing lump in his throat. "Mom, I woke up yesterday in San Jose and I don't know how I got here or what's going on and they said I got traded-"

"Joey! Joey, honey, slow down. Take a deep breath for me sweetie."

It practically killed Joe, vibrating out of his skin as he was, to try to follow her orders, but he did his best. When she heard him exhale, his mom continued, "Okay, honey, listen to me. I've been speaking with your coach nearly every day the past few weeks; actually, I thought it might be him calling me. You have a concussion, and sometimes you forget things."

She spoke like she was reading it from a script, like it was something she'd memorized.

Like it was something she'd said over and over by now, until it was old hat, rehearsed.

The cold, hunted feeling crept back into Joe's shoulders, tense and gleeful shard of ice burrowing into his muscles.

"No," he whispered. He didn't want to let the tears start to burn in his eyes again but it was already happening, too fast and too late for him to try to control it. "M-Mom, I, I feel like I'm losing my mind here."

The way her breath caught audibly, pained and heartbroken, was one of the first things he knew was real since he woke up in San Jose.

"Oh, Joey, no, you're not going crazy. You were hurt, but you're going to get better. You're already getting better. Just because you forget things sometimes doesn't mean you're not going to get back to normal. The team is – they don't even think it's going to be that long!"

It was the same voice she'd used when Joe's older brother broke his leg in middle school and Joe watched his mom try to tell him that it really didn't look that bad.

His bone had been visible through his skin.

"I'm on a team I don't remember with people I don't know, who all keep telling me things about myself that I don't remember, and I'm living with strangers and everybody is keeping things from me and I can't even play hockey and-"

Here Joe's voice failed on him, trailing into a wet, crackling gasp. He squeezed his eyes shut and wiped roughly at his face with the back of his hand, only succeeding in smearing the tears around.

"Mom, I just want to come home," he whispered. "If I can't play hockey and I'm just broken, I just – I want to come home."

"Joey..." It was his mom who sounded shaken, who sounded heartbroken. "Sweetheart, you're going to get better soon, I promise. But you can't go on planes right now – the doctors said it's not good for you to travel."

Joe could have guessed that, but it did nothing to help the sinking feeling in his stomach, the tightening in his chest. "I know, but can't I just – couldn't you-" He couldn't even get the words out, wasn't sure what he was trying to request. For a visit, for an intervention, for a rewind, for a memory.

Whatever it was, he doubted his mom could provide it, but there wasn't anyone else he trusted to try.

"I'll tell you what," she said, sounding like she was fending off tears herself. "We'll give it a week, and if at the end of the week you still want me to, I'll fly out there and stay with you until you can come home. Do you think you can do that for me?"

A week of this, when one day had been utterly terrifying, sounded absolutely impossible and maybe a little cruel. But it was his mom, and she was trying to get him to be an adult about this and stick it out, undoubtedly, and he owed it to her to try.

"Okay. I'll – I'll try."

"That's all I can ask."

They made small talk for a few minutes, his mom wanting to know everything about where he'd been staying, about what it was like helping with Marcus and Kevin. She kept saying to trust the team, that Burnzie and he had hit it off very well, "You're like peas in a pod, Joey, I'm telling you, just give him a chance, you two were getting along like a house on fire."

According to his mother, he was good friends with Burnzie and Pavs and someone named Logan, "but really honey you love all of those boys so much, just give them a chance."

Joe didn't know how much he could have loved them when he got concussed and forgot them shortly after meeting them, but he didn't want to make her feel bad by pointing that out.

Eventually Joe felt guilty about how many long-distance minutes he was using and had to end the call, but not before his mom extracted a promise from him to "call any time he wanted, and let her know the moment anything changed, and if he ever wanted to make a phone call she would tell Peter to always let Joe use his phone."

Somehow, Joe was entirely sure that his mother _would_ order his coach around, and it would probably work. His mother had a way of being sweet and unassuming and always getting her demands fulfilled.

He almost didn't want to leave the office afterwards, because he knew that would mean facing everyone again. And despite his mother's insistence that he "deeply loved" these people, it did nothing to quell his anxiety when he had literally just heard them talking about him behind his back.

"They're just concerned for you, sweetie," his mother had said, and Joe wanted to believe her, wanted to believe her way of promising everything was perfectly okay. If she thought something was wrong, she would have intervened. That's what he reminded himself over and over. She used to get into arguments with his peewee coach if she thought that there was inequality on the team, and she was referring to an NHL coach by his first name: if she thought something was strange, she'd want to get to the bottom of it.

But the image of stark white through the gore of his brother's broken leg hung over Joe's vision like the lingering flash from a camera as he stepped into the hallway.

Pavs was lingering outside the office when Joe exited. "Hey, how did it go?"

"Fine," Joe mumbled. "Is Burnzie ready to go? Or am I staying somewhere else now?"

From the look on Pavs's face, he wanted to say more, or was expecting Joe to say more, and he paused for a moment, looking almost a little hurt. But Joe couldn't afford to let himself feel sympathy for someone he couldn't trust.

He kept to himself the rest of the way to the car. A few people tried to talk to him when they went to the lounge to find Burnzie and the kids, but Joe could barely get his mouth to function. It was like it was heavy, weighted, like it had been wired shut and it was an effort to get a single word out. He just felt jittery and low, wanted nothing more than to hide himself away from these people he didn't know.

The picture of a Calder winner, he was sure.

The kids bounced around at his feet as they walked through the arena. Marcus insisted on holding Joe's hand, saying something to him in Swedish that was making one of the nameless Swedish guys snicker as he headed to his car. Nobody would tell Joe what he was saying and that made him feel even more agitated, like he was the butt of some great joke. He couldn't blame Marcus – it wasn't the kid's fault he didn't know English – but he could definitely blame the group of Swedish guys who seemed to think this was incredibly amusing. And really, it was fucking irresponsible and cruel of them to keep making this kid stay with people who couldn't understand him. What if there was an emergency and he couldn't even tell them what was wrong?

This whole thing was fucked up, the whole damn team. Boston hadn't been great for Joe, but it was fine. The team was fine. Nobody targeted him, or insulted him to his face. Sure, he knew they had to be judging him behind his back because he was a fucking disappointment, but they were always cordial about it.

But this whole deal, this just wasn't right. None of it was.

"Joe!" Kevin shrieked, smacking Joe across the face with one tiny, pudgy hand. Joe blinked at him, momentarily stunned, and was distantly glad he didn't just drop Kevin in surprise.

(Perhaps Kevin's refusal to wear shoes was part of a ploy to never have to walk anywhere in public. If it was, he was doing an excellent job of it.)

"What?" Joe groused.

Kevin smiled at him with his weird little crooked baby teeth.

"Car, Joe," Kevin said serenely.

Most of Kevin's other words seemed to be demands for food, demands for where he wanted to be, and assessments on if he wanted to do something (almost invariably "no," wailed loud and long), but for some fucking reason he could almost perfectly pronounce "car."

"Yes, we're going in the car," Joe mumbled, and he buckled Kevin into his car seat with as little fanfare as possible. Burnzie was keeping up a steady stream of useless chatter to Marcus with the occasional comment that was clearly directed towards Joe, but Joe chose to pretend he couldn't hear it.

They had been in the car for about ten minutes before Burnzie decided to state the obvious. "You're quiet," he said softly.

Joe stared at the touch screen built into the dashboard.

_The tvs are different, the cars are different_.

"I'm tired," Joe said.

At least it wasn't a lie, like everything Burnzie had told him.

Joe went up to his room as soon as they got home, claiming he was going to take a nap. Maybe he would. There wasn't anything of interest in there, because Burnzie had the remote to the television and would hear it even if Joe did manage to turn it on. The rest of Joe's belongings were still "where he was staying before" or whatever, and nobody seemed eager to retrieve them or tell him where that was.

Hiding out in his bedroom meant ignoring Kevin's whine that signaled that he wanted Joe to play with him, and Marcus's gently concerned calls of his name through the door, before Burnzie told them in a hushed voice that they had to be polite and let Joe rest.

It almost made Joe feel bad. Almost, until he remembered that Burnzie had told Pavs he was using the kids as a distraction to keep Joe from asking questions or thinking about things too much.

Well, fuck that. It may not have been the kids' fault, but he wasn't going to be their free babysitter just to let those assholes distract him from the bigger picture.

He laid on the bed and replayed that snippet of conversation over and over again, trying to make sense of it, look for something he might have missed.

The context was glaringly missing, but one thing that did stand out was that the team had a game tomorrow, and before morning skate Pavs and Burnzie were going to "check in" about Joe's situation with someone named Patty. Joe wasn't sure who in this current organization that would be – because fuck knows, nobody could explain what happened to all of the Sharks players that Joe remembered as being on the team, unless they'd all been fucking traded in the past few months – but he knew he wanted to be there for that conversation.

Joe refused lunch, and only came down for dinner because Marcus stood outside his door and kept talking in gentle, quiet Swedish until Joe opened it and let Marcus lead him by the hand downstairs. He was minimally responsive to Burnzie's conversation, and he knew he was being sullen and rude, and the exact opposite of what his mother would want, but that wasn't enough to sway his feelings.

They were trying to distract him, trying to keep him in the dark about something, and he wasn't going to play into it. He wasn't going to give them what they wanted. And if that meant making them uncomfortable, and refusing to give them any information, and sleuthing out everything they wouldn't tell him, then he'd do it.

If he couldn't play hockey, he might as well play fucking detective.

Joe announced he was showering and going to bed immediately after dinner. By that point Burnzie didn't even try to argue with him.

The kids still slipped into Joe's room shortly after nine. This time he just pulled back the blankets so they'd have an easier time of getting into bed.

He was up before Burnzie knocked on his door the next morning, because he could barely sleep. Funny how hard that was when you didn't feel safe.

"Who's the game against today?" Joe asked over breakfast. He made a point of barely looking up from his toast, but he could still see Burnzie's pause of surprise at being spoken to.

"Toronto," he said, clearing his throat. "That'll be an interesting one, right, going up against your hometown team?"

"I'm not playing, so not really, no."

Joe had been scratched when the Bruins played in Toronto on New Year's Eve. It was only fitting that he'd miss tonight's game too.

He watched as Burnzie's expression fell just the slightest bit, and felt a bolt of satisfaction. It may not have been mature, but it did feel good.

"One of the guys is bringing board games," Burnzie said on yet another of their awkward car rides. "So you guys will have something else to do today. We just have morning skate, and then we'll all go home for a nap. The doctors don't want you actually watching the game tonight because of all the sounds and noise, so I'm going to see if maybe someone's wife could sit with you guys at the house so the kids can get to bed on time and you don't have to hang out in the lounge for hours waiting for us to get done."

It was morbidly fascinating how Burnzie presented this all like it was a good thing, like Joe would be excited to play, what, fucking Candy Land for a few hours, and then go home and have a woman his brother's age come over to babysit him like he was just another one of the kids, because that's what he was here. No control over his life, treated like a fucking idiot who couldn't do anything for himself, not allowed to make his own decisions or do anything without supervision, not even allowed to sit in a house for a few hours without someone making sure he wasn't staring directly into the fucking sun or poisoning the kids or whatever the fuck they thought would happen if he was left alone.

"I had my own apartment in Boston," Joe said quietly. He watched the palm trees go by outside and wondered how he'd felt looking at them coming in to San Jose the first time. Maybe they'd felt like hope, a fresh beginning.

Now they were just a reminder that he'd stepped into another life here, a life that wasn't his own to live.

Burnzie cast him a quick glance before looking back at the road. "Yeah, I know. But right now you're going through a lot and we want you to be safe. It's all temporary, you know th-"

"No I don't know that!" Joe snapped. He hadn't noticed that the kids had been chattering in the backseat until they abruptly fell silent. "All I fucking remember is the past forty-eight hours and in that time I'm barely allowed to take a piss without someone watching to see that I'm not fucking drowning in it or something, so that doesn't feel really fucking temporary, does it?"

There was a squeak from the backseat, like a cut off whine, followed immediately by a tremulous, "Joe?"

They came to a red light and Burnzie was glaring absolute murder at Joe, in a way that was probably quite effective on the ice, when used on someone whose heart wasn't pounding out of his chest with the anxiety and lack of fucks given by a caged animal who was ready to snap at the hand feeding them.

"Watch your language," Burnzie growled.

A lot of thoughts came to Joe's mind in that moment. The smart one was to shut up until they got to the arena, because God knows he'd rather die than apologize right now. Maybe apologizing to the kids for scaring them, but not Burnzie. But there was also another idea, burgeoning in the back of his brain and growing stronger by the second.

He was an adult. He wasn't playing tonight. There was no reason for him to be at the game.

He could just leave.

It was fucking stupid because he didn't know where he was or where he'd go and he didn't even have an address for where he lived, but Joe's hand was already slipping down to unbuckle his seatbelt while he flipped open the lock on the door with his other hand.

Joe was only there long enough to see Burnzie's eyes start to widen, to hear his panicked, "What the hell are you-" before he was tossing himself out of the car and slamming the door behind him. The light was turning green, and Burnzie was in a car with two small children; there was no way he could run after Joe or try to stop him.

There wasn't even one solitary second of thought before Joe was booking it down the street.

Based on the buildings it was definitely a commercial area, hotels and restaurants and shops. It probably wasn't that far from the arena, so if and when he felt like not being an asshole he could always ask for directions there. But right now he just needed to be anywhere _not_ in that car, anywhere that he had control and made his own decisions that weren't choosing between children's activities presented to him by a stranger.

He ducked between some buildings to head to the next street over, spent the next few minutes doing his best version of evasive maneuvers in case Burnzie was circling to find him. But the roads were pretty busy, and nobody was paying him any mind.

In a way it was a relief. Back in Boston everyone knew exactly who he was, and it made him cringe every time, to see the disappointment on their faces.

He wasn't sure if it was better or worse that he wasn't a big enough deal here for people to know the first-round pick they'd traded for.

The sheer idiocy of his plan, or lack thereof, became pretty much immediately apparent when he remembered that he didn't have one bit of money on him, not even enough for a pay phone. Not that he knew a number for anyone local anyways, and hockey players probably did a good job of staying out of the phonebook.

And what was he planning to do, anyway? He'd made a scene and undoubtedly upset the kids and that was his way of showing what a mature and trustworthy adult he was. His mom would be so fucking disappointed in him; it had barely been one day and he'd already fucked up the whole one-week plan.

But at the same time he couldn't see things going differently. Maybe he'd have hit the arena and _then_ he'd have booked it but either way, he couldn't stand living like that anymore, being shuttled around like a child, everyone dismissing him and telling him what to do and to just be patient and not ask questions while behind his back they whispered about things they clearly thought he shouldn't know.

Maybe he was sick. Like, really sick, like terminal sick, and nobody wanted to tell him. Maybe he had a brain tumor and that's why he kept forgetting things and then being okay and then forgetting again, but it was inoperable so they were just trying to make him comfortable until it killed him.

Maybe he really was just crazy.

It would explain his phenomenally bad decision-making skills.

He didn't realize he was crying until a voice asked, "Sir, are you okay?"

There was a woman standing in front of him, probably around his mom's age, blonde hair just starting to grey at the temples. She was dressed in a pantsuit and holding a travel mug, but she looked ready to drop everything business-related to try to help him. Definitely somebody's mom.

Immediately Joe scrubbed at his face. Fuck, that was a good look: injured fuck-up rookie goes AWOL on his team and runs around the city crying. Real role model behavior right there.

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine, thank you." He gave her a smile that was probably more grim than media-friendly and made like he had to leave.

But the woman was squinting at him, and Joe knew that look because he'd seen it back in Boston.

"Has anyone ever told you that you look like Joe Thornton?" the woman asked.

The grimace turned impossibly more brittle. Joe was about to say something tired and glib about getting that a lot before the woman continued, "Yeah, you look just like him when he was young, you should look up the photos. I know it's hard to imagine with the beard now but I promise, the similarity is uncanny."

She laughed, and Joe had to force a laugh to avoid admitting that he had no fucking clue what she was talking about. The beard? It had to be another Joe Thornton.

That would make sense, San Jose having a second, more famous Joe Thornton than the one on their hockey team. It would be a solidly shitty cherry on an already shitty sundae.

Joe made a few forgettable pleasantries that he'd never recall later and exited the conversation at a fast clip, power walking in the general direction of _who the fuck cares_.

He saw signs for a park and his relief was overwhelming. Sitting on a bench and watching ducks or some shit for an hour and having everyone leave him along sounded like fucking heaven.

There were a few walking paths and Joe started himself on one at random, for lack of a better option. People were around, but not so many that it felt cramped or overwhelming, so Joe shoved his fists in his pockets and walked.

Eventually he heard the sound of running water and followed it to an actual stream. The weather was pretty warm, and there were birds playing in the water – but instead of ducks it was, fuck, the same goddamn geese he could see back home. How were those bastards ever considered endangered if they lived across the whole fucking continent?

But they were far enough away that they probably wouldn't try to maul him if he sat on a bench and watched their goslings play in the reeds at the edge of the water. At least that was one thing nobody was lying about, it was definitely spring, but that just highlighted how much time Joe was missing. His whole world had turned upside down in the past month and he couldn't even remember it.

He was going to have to quit hockey. The thought of it made him want to puke but there wasn't an alternative, he was too much of a fucking mess, couldn't function, couldn't stay in the damn car without upsetting the kids, and nobody would let him do anything until he recovered but what if he _didn't_ recover, he didn't even know what was _wrong_-

Joe took a deep, shuddering breath, pressing his fingertips to his eyes until bright colors bloomed behind his eyelids.

There was nothing for it. Unless and until he got better, he couldn't even dream of playing hockey. He'd have to go back to Ontario and wait it out, and if it never got better, or if it got better but he still had such a bad reputation from this whole year-

Well. There was a strong chance that Joe had already played his last NHL game, and he didn't even remember it.

"You don't remember anything and you're still this predictable?"

At first Joe thought it was part of his internal monologue, until it occurred to him that his internal monologue usually sounded like, y'know, him, instead of...

Slowly, painfully, he dragged his hands away from his face and looked up at him.

A man was standing in front of him with a face that was painfully open in its expressiveness. Joe knew all about it, because he'd teased him for it before, back at the draft.

Patrick Marleau's eyes were stupidly, ridiculously fond as he stood in front of Joe with his arms crossed over his chest. A chest that was much bigger than Joe remembered it, more filled out than the skinny kid from the draft, and those eyes-

His whole face was lined like a pencil sketch, wrinkles creasing his forehead, tracing crinkles around his eyes. Dark hair that was trimmed short and his stubble was speckled with grey.

It was like Patrick Marleau's father had just appeared in front of him, except Joe had met Marleau's father, and that's not what he looked like either, but then-

"What?" Joe breathed.

Somehow, the smile got even warmer.

"God, I'd forgotten how young we were. There's a difference between knowing it and seeing it, you know?"

"...Marleau?"

It felt fake to even say it, to someone who clearly was not the teenager Joe was drafted with less than a year ago, but those eyes...

A nod, simple and infinitely confusing.

"Yeah, Joe. It's me. You mind if I sit?"

He actually waited for Joe's nod, like he would just stand if Joe said he wasn't comfortable with it.

It was bizarre, but also a little comforting.

Marleau sat down next to him, but not so close that Joe felt smothered. "You know, I'm the one who first brought you here," Marleau said conversationally. "Back when you first got traded. We used to go running here all the time."

Joe stared, and with each passing second, Marleau's smile started to fade a little more until it landed near a grimace.

"You've been through a lot the past few days, Joe, and it's not your fault. If those idiots told you what had happened right from the start, I think we could have avoided all..." He gestured at the area around them. "This."

He had answers. This, this strange version of Marleau, he knew what was happening.

Joe's tongue felt thick and dry in his mouth.

He wasn't sure if he wanted to know.

"I...what's happening?"

Marleau put a hand on Joe's shoulder. It was warm, almost paternal, and Joe couldn't help but stare at it.

"Joe," Marleau said in an impossibly gentle voice, "You don't have a concussion. You're not sick, and you're not crazy. The guys didn't know how to explain things in a way that made sense, so they came up with a ridiculously idiotic lie and kept making things worse."

That part wasn't so bad, was actually a relief, because it was confirming that Joe wasn't just absolutely fucking insane, that he could get better.

And then Marleau’s next words hit him like a punch to the gut.

"There's no good way to say this. Joe, it's 2019. Something happened that aged you back to your rookie year, but you and I are almost forty years old."

It made no sense. It made horrible sense. It made as much sense as any other part of Joe's life.

Joe sat there, frozen and watching the geese, and said nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll edit the tags later on but for right now I like the idea of the audience putting things together with Joe as opposed to figuring it all out from the tags.


	2. Endling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unedited. Hover-over text translations for Swedish, piping hot from Google translate.
> 
> I learned the word "endling" about six months ago and became obsessed with the idea of a creature being the last of its kind and transposed it onto my fic about aging hockey players. This is the result. (And then all the other titles were chosen based to fit around that concept.)
> 
> In the end splitting this story into two parts worked out well, because it really is two different stories in one. The first part is Joe figuring out what's going on. The journey back is a little different, but I'd like to think they blend well together.

_Endling: an individual living thing that is the last survivor of its species and whose death consequently means the extinction of that species._

A plastic bottle floated down the stream and bumped into one of the geese, setting off a bout of truly horrendous honking.

"That's some verified Canadiana right there," Marleau said. His hand was still on Joe's shoulder and it was incredibly distracting, even as the goose screamed at the departing bottle.

There were so many questions that Joe could have asked, so many bubbling up in his throat like bile, burning the edges of his tongue.

And yet the question that came out was, "Are we friends?"

If the change in conversation surprised him, Marleau gave nothing away. His face was a picture of tender sincerity, so much so that Joe wanted to ask if he had to practice it.

He didn't ask; he was sure that it came naturally. Marleau just had that kind of eyes.

The smile he received made his face warm.

"Joe, you're one of my best friends in the whole world."

Marleau's hand was still so heavy on Joe's shoulder, and he squeezed it as if to emphasize his words.

"But – but you got traded for me."

There was a pause, Marleau's painfully sincere expression twisting up into one of befuddlement, like a cat that had just tasted something surprisingly foul.

"Is that what those dumbasses told you?"

Well, in retrospect, Joe had asked if that's what had happened, and nobody had told him he was wrong, and maybe he should have been more wary of everyone's refusal to give him specific details. But he'd still been led to believe he was correct, and so he gave a shy half-shrug.

Marleau shook his head. "God, I'm gonna kill them. No, you and I weren't traded for each other. You got traded from the Bruins to the Sharks in 2005 by a GM who was a flaming asshole – you were the captain, they traded you for a whole bunch of people, the GM was a dick about it, you won a bunch of trophies that year, it was a whole thing. You and I played together for over a decade; I only signed with the Leafs last year."

It sounded fake, like the stories that kids would tell each other on the playground, about what a great player they were going to be, all of the awards they'd get, how everyone would have their jersey. None of it felt true.

The part about a general manager disliking Joe and trading him – that part made perfect sense.

"So did we ever..."

Joe trailed off into an embarrassed silence, unsure he could even finish that sentence without sounding like the little kid Marleau must think him to be. God, this whole thing felt false because he _was_ eighteen, but it was – nice to listen to. A fun thought exercise, if a horrifying reality.

Marleau finally removed his hand as he chuckled quietly, shaking his head. "No, we didn't get the Cup. But we did get an Olympic gold medal together, if it's any consolation."

It kind of was, because Joe still felt like that kid on the playground, making up stories about his future only to be told that some of them might actually be true.

He wanted to ask more – so much more, about his family, about his team, about what the world was supposed to be like if it was, what, fucking 2019? Twenty-one years later and they're both still in the NHL?

But that was the actual pressing question, the one holding back the torrent fighting to escape.

"How could any of this be real?" Joe breathed.

The smile slipping from Marleau's face was more foreboding than Joe would have liked. Marleau sighed, looking out at the birds again; then he seemed to steel himself, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on his knees as he turned back to Joe.

"Have you ever heard somebody make a comment about the hockey gods before?"

Joe nearly stood up and walked off right there.

"Dude, don't fuck with me right now, I can't take more-"

"Hey."

He jolted when Marleau's big hand landed now on his knee. Joe stared at it, utterly unable to look away, but Marleau's thumb moved against the side of his leg with the type of familiarity which said that they'd done this before.

There was no way for Joe to feel about it other than horribly self-aware and willing himself not to get an inappropriate hard-on from someone touching his thigh. Which was very much not a point in favor of him allegedly being nearly forty years old.

"I have never once lied to you before, and I don't plan to start now," Marleau was saying, drawing Joe's gaze back to his arrestingly genuine stare. "Just try to hear me out and suspend judgment for a minute."

Just like before, Marleau waited for Joe to nod until he'd proceed.

"So I'm sure you've heard that sometimes people toss around the phrase 'hockey gods' as a joke, like praying to the hockey gods for a win or something. For the most part when people bring it up it really is just a joke. But sometimes..."

He paused and looked off for a moment as if trying to put his words together. His thumb still moved steadily against Joe's knee, like maybe he didn't even realize he was doing it. Like it was soothing for him.

"Things happen sometimes in hockey that are more than just a coincidence. Guys who should have gotten killed by a skate blade come back to play again. Someone who should have lost an eye from a puck barely has a bruise. And to fans they'd just see that as amazing luck. But for a lot of players..."

He shrugged.

"It's the hockey gods. And yes, that does sound like a coincidence. But the longer you're in the league, the more stories you hear, the more you start to realize that there's something out there, acting on players' wishes. We say hockey gods because we don't have a better understanding of it, but there's like...just some part of the universe that seems to respond specifically to hockey players' requests. But not always in a good way."

Joe was trying very, very hard not to roll his eyes, and was only succeeding because more of his energy was going into trying to forget that Marleau was touching him, and how much Joe would have killed for that to have happened at the draft instead of right now.

"Wouldn't everyone who wished for the Cup get it then?"

"Not exactly," Marleau said. "The general consensus is that wishing for the Cup, or for any sort of achievement, never seems to actually work. But sometimes people wish for something like to be on their childhood team, and they get there, and it's a great media story, but they play horribly, or they're miserable there. Or they return to coach their old team as a hero and they leave it within a few years with all their old fans despising them. A guy wishing to have a harder slap shot but now he can never hit the net. Sometimes people realize the hockey gods answered their wish and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they don't even realize they made a wish at all. But it doesn't matter if the wish was intentional – it matters if they mean it. If you mean it, they'll listen."

It sounded like that creepy story they made them read in high school about the rabbit's foot or whatever. "So it always goes bad."

Marleau made a face. "Not necessarily bad, but not usually great either. You get what you want, but with a price tag. Sometimes it's about learning a lesson."

"Okay, but how does that explain me...going forward in time?"

Joe didn't have a better way to put it, didn't know how to think of how Marleau said it, like Joe had shrunken down or magically gotten younger or something. Like a sci-fi movie.

"Deaging," Marleau said, as if he was reading Joe's mind. "If it was real time travel, I'd expect your older self to still be here. This is...by all accounts, you showed up to practice the other day as your present-day self, and then you weren't."

"And you think that some magical hockey gods made me young again?" Joe's voice cracked the higher it got, as if to punctuate his point.

"I'll put it to you this way: just since coming to the Leafs I've been told about a guy a few years ago who got sick of the media attention and accidentally turned himself invisible. Like, completely invisible and it took days to get him back to normal because the only way to reverse it was to get him to genuinely wish to have that attention back. So I'd say it's plausible that you could have been turned back to an eighteen year old if you'd wished for it hard enough."

Well that right there was how Joe knew it had to be fake.

"There's no way that any future version of me would want to be eighteen again," he said. He bit the words off before he could reveal his hand too far, admit that the only good thing about turning eighteen had been knowing that he was eligible for the NHL, that everything since had been downhill.

But from the look on Marleau's face, he already knew. It would make sense, if they really were friends, if they really had played together for so long.

"I know," Marleau said quietly. Joe would never admit to having skimmed a few of his mother's romance novels before – only for the sex scenes, if anyone asked – but he thought maybe Marleau's eyes were what they meant when they used the word _soulful_. "You hated your rookie year, and if it's any consolation, your sophomore year was great and you only got better from there. But our theory is..."

His smile was a little chagrinned, a little self-deprecating, and he squeezed Joe's knee again in the best and worst way. "We're getting old, Joe. This is your second season signing a one-year contract because you weren't sure if your knees would be able to withstand multiple years of hockey. And we got really fucking close, once, but we never won the Cup. And you love the game so much...look, it just wouldn't be shocking if you'd wished for a do-over. To be younger and have more time to win, which coincidentally would mean starting you over at your rookie year."

It didn't shock Joe at all, but that was because Joe already wanted a do-over of his NHL career.

"So you all think I...wished to be this way."

Marleau shrugged and rubbed Joe's leg, drawing Joe's gaze right back down again. He thought very firmly of the article he'd read saying that drafting him first overall was a mistake and hoped that would be enough to get his dick to behave.

"It's our best guess. Admittedly, nobody knows why Kevin and Marcus got dragged into it, but-"

"Wait, what about the kids?" It was strange, how Joe's heart leapt into his throat. He barely knew the kids, but the thought of something happening to them made his stomach twist.

Marleau's eyes crinkled when he smiled, highlighting little crow's feet that definitely weren't there the last time Joe saw him. Age looked good on Marleau, Joe decided. He hoped he looked that good at thirty-nine.

"Kevin and Marcus are your linemates," Marleau said. "They both got turned into their ages from early 1998, the same as you. We're not quite sure why."

Joe blinked. "They're little kids."

"Yeah. That's kind of a joke with the media, how your linemates are so much younger than you. But you guys have played really well together and you love them to death. You're basically Bancer's idol – Kevin," Marleau explained after a moment's pause. "That kid would do anything for you."

Somehow, of this whole thing, Kevin loving Joe a bit too much was one thing that made sense without Joe having to think it over first. Not that he understood it in the first place, but it definitely matched how he acted as a toddler.

"Do the kids remember? Who they are, I mean. Because they act like they recognize me."

Marleau shrugged. "I don't know. They got deaged at the same time as you – from how Burnzie tells it, there was a weird sound and suddenly the three of you were young and unconscious. They had to rush to the gift shop to get clothes for the kids and when the kids woke up they weren't too bothered by anything. I don't know, kids are resilient sometimes. They probably see this as one big adventure."

Now that part Joe could believe. Kevin and Marcus had more confidence these past few days than Joe had in the past year.

"So I dragged them into this." It wasn't a question, and Joe didn't pose it as one. It was all seeming pretty cut and dry now, actually: he had, for whatever reason, wished to be young again, and some ephemeral universal power had seen fit to not only fulfill his wish, but drag two of his teammates along for the ride.

He imagined he wouldn't exactly be Kevin's favorite person anymore once this all got sorted out.

Marleau huffed and gave him a sideways glance that was more playful than Joe was expecting. "Not necessarily. We don't know exactly what the wish was or why they were included. Only way to find out is for you to wish yourself back to normal."

"Okay, well I wish it right now."

Nothing happened.

"Oh, buddy."

On anyone else that smile would have been insufferably condescending, but on Marleau it just looked fond, maybe a little sly. It suited him, Joe thought distantly, this brand of mischievousness veiled by genuine kindness.

"It doesn't work that way," Marleau said, squeezing Joe's knee again and then patting it affectionately. "You have to mean it – really know what you want, and mean it. Do you really want to be thirty-nine right now?"

They both knew the answer was no, because Joe couldn't really fathom being anyone other than himself – himself, at his current age. From everything Marleau had said, he was a happier person at thirty-nine, and Joe was inclined to believe him, but that didn't suddenly make it easy for Joe to whole-heartedly desire to be twenty-one years older.

At the same time, he couldn't imagine himself somehow magically wishing for that and wanting it, so this might take longer than everyone was assuming.

Joe started to shake his head when the sound of a phone ringing startled him, making him jump away from Patty. The sound was tinny, like it was a recording – which made sense when Patty's hand finally left Joe's leg to pull something out of his pocket from which the sound had been emanating.

"Sorry, I should really get this," Marleau said. He flashed Joe an apologetic look as he tapped the screen with a jabbing finger and then put it to his ear because that was apparently a fucking phone?

"Yeah, I got him. He's fine. I _told_ you I knew all his old haunts – the park, yeah, just like I said. Okay. We'll be there – okay. Thanks. Bye."

Marleau jabbed at the device again and then looked back at Joe.

"Sorry, whoever found you first was supposed to let the others know, but I clearly forgot."

Joe watched carefully as Marleau slipped the device back into his pocket. "Others?"

"Everyone who went out looking for you." Marleau stood from the bench and kind of nodded to himself, brushing off the back of his pants even though there was nothing on them. "C'mon, we should get you back to the arena."

He held out a hand to Joe and even though Joe didn't need it, shouldn't have encouraged more physical contact with Marleau, he couldn't stop himself from taking hold of Marleau's hand. It was warm and dry, and softer than Joe expected, despite the usual hockey calluses. Marleau pulled him up easily, like it was nothing, and while Joe would have expected it from any hockey player, it still made his stomach twist pleasantly.

Searching desperately for any distraction he could get, Joe eyed Marleau's pocket.

"So that's like – a phone?" It didn't look like a phone – it was only about the size of Joe's Game Boy, but more fragile looking, and way too small for a standard battery.

But Marleau nodded and smirked. "Modern cell phones are basically computers with touch screens that fit in your pocket. And everyone has one."

Joe had seen cell phones before – some of the guys on the Bruins had them, and the coach and the GM. But they definitely weren't something – like that. Flat and thin and with a touch screen instead of buttons. Did everything in the future have a touch screen?

"You know you threw Burnzie for a loop when you asked to use the phone," Marleau said. He was still holding onto Joe's hand, like he'd forgotten about it when it was all Joe could think of. Obliviously, Marleau continued, "He's just got a phone like mine now, no landline, and he had to think up a place where he could get you on a landline that looked like something you'd recognize."

In retrospect, there had been something awfully suspicious about that whole call. But that also meant...

"My mom lied to me," Joe said quietly.

"Hey." He startled when Marleau squeezed his hand and still made no move to let go. "Don't blame her. The guys asked her to go along with their story, to keep you from getting upset. I think – no, they definitely really underestimated how distressing this whole experience would be for you. They didn't think anything through."

Joe didn't need anyone to tell him that, because he'd been living through their awful storytelling for the past few days.

But now he knew why his mom had sounded so out of sorts on the phone. He'd have to call her, to let him know that he knew, now, and that he wasn't mad at her. That was the sort of thing that would eat her up, if she didn't hear from him.

"Yeah," he muttered, because Marleau seemed to be waiting for some sort of response.

Marleau nodded and began pulling Joe down the path with him. As soon as he knew Joe was following, he dropped Joe's hand.

It was a relief, but tempered by a spike of regret that Joe would rather not look into too deeply.

The silence they walked in wasn't uncomfortable – if anything, Marleau seemed perfectly at home here, and that went a long way to put Joe at ease. Even if, Joe reminded himself, Marleau felt at home here because this _had_ been his home for many years. But the silence made Joe think more, and it brought him right back to his earliest question.

"So...we're friends."

It didn't take more than a quick, hopefully surreptitious glance to see that Marleau's lips were curved in a smile. "Good friends, yes."

"So then that means I call you...Patrick, right?"

Marleau immediately made a face. "Only when you're being a dick. You've always called me Patty."

There was nothing earth-shattering about that, and yet it still made Joe's heart race a little faster. He was glad that Marleau – _Patty_ – had stopped holding his hand, so that he couldn't feel how sweaty it was getting.

"Oh," Joe said quietly, for lack of a better response.

If it struck Patty as odd, he didn't say anything. "For the record, the boys pretty much universally refer to you as Jumbo. Apparently some of them started having a crisis when you told them to stop because they've never used your real name before."

Joe still didn't have the slightest clue about that nickname, but it made him flush all the same to imagine what his team must have thought of him. "Why do they call me that?"

Patty huffed, smiling again. "It's not that creative, actually. They had to differentiate between two Joes. Pavs was Little Joe, and you were Jumbo Joe, because of-"

"The fucking elephant statue, right?" Joe groaned.

"Got it in one. Though most of the boys don't even know where it's from, they just know that's what they've been calling you for – well, forever, pretty much."

As hockey nicknames went, Joe supposed it could have been a lot worse.

The trees in this park weren't particularly tall, and so as they walked, Joe could start to make out-

"Is that the arena? Like. Right fucking there?"

Maybe he should go back and drown himself in the stream with those geese, or let them peck him to death, because his big dramatic Lost in San Jose experience had landed him what appeared to be a five minute stroll from the arena.

Patty was doing a very poor job of trying to cover up his laughter, which was to say, not at all. "How do you think I got here? My car's back in Toronto right now. Burnzie said you'd booked it and I told them I'd come look out here. Found you within fifteen minutes. Like I said, you're a creature of habit – even when you don't know where you are, you go to the same places."

Joe wasn't sure how to feel about that, but he didn't have to feel any particular sort of way, because they came to the edge of the park. The sunlight was bright, outside of the relative shade of the trees, but it didn't stop Joe from looking across the street and seeing-

"Is that me?"

He hadn't come up on this side of the building before, because he was sure he would have remembered it. Burnzie must have been driving loops around the city to keep Joe from spotting any of this, because there were posters of different Sharks players lining the sidewalk outside the arena, and one of them looked like Joe, if Joe was in the American Civil War and took facial hair advice from Burnzie.

That set Patty outright cackling, like full-blown, clutching his stomach, eyes squinted shut laughter. It made Joe's chest feel loose and warm, even if it was sort of at his expense.

"God, I wish I'd filmed that, the boys would have loved it. Trust me, you love the beard. You and Burnzie are extremely proud of your beards. It's a _thing_ now."

Joe very wisely did not mention that he couldn't grow a beard at all right now. He was sure that Patty already knew that.

"I look like I've been stuck on a desert island for five years," he mumbled, staring resolutely at the red light above the crosswalk and not at the poster of what was definitely appearing to be his older self.

"It's popular with the waitresses," Patty said lightly.

Joe looked at him from the corner of his eye. "Do I pick up a lot of waitresses?"

He wasn't sure how he'd feel about that.

After a moment of deliberation, as if he were weighing how much he wanted to reveal, Patty shrugged one shoulder and said, "It works on other people too."

Then the light turned green and Patty was hauling Joe across the street and back into the arena – which was apparently called SAP Center now, and Joe decided it wasn't worth his time to bother asking what the fuck SAP was right now.

Patty navigated the arena without a thought, which probably made sense if he'd played with the Sharks for two decades. None of the arena staff seemed to find it strange either, to find an enemy player wandering on his own, far away from the visitors' area.

But then, someone who spent that long with your team could never truly be an enemy.

And of the two of them, thirty-nine year old Patrick Marleau of the Toronto Maple Leafs probably made a lot more sense than eighteen year old Joe Thornton in 2019.

They rounded a vaguely familiar corner and then a small but surprisingly forceful weight slammed into Joe's calves, sending him stumbling back against the wall.

"Joe!" Kevin yelled, wrapping his tiny octopus arms around Joe's knee. Marcus was there too a moment later, a little shier as he came up against Joe's other side, as if unsure of his welcome; when Joe lifted his arm, Marcus gladly tucked himself under it, hugging Joe's waist and burying his face against Joe's t-shirt.

Kevin was sounding suspiciously sniffly, and Joe would bet that no small amount of snot and tears were being rubbed against his jeans right now. He'd be grossed out if it didn't make him feel like the biggest asshole in the world, making little kids cry – little kids who were only little kids because he'd somehow _deaged_ his linemates.

"Don't leave, Joe!" Kevin whined, his face alarmingly red. "'S bad! No!"

It was the most words Joe had ever heard Kevin state that didn't just consist of his name and a direction, and somehow that just made Joe feel worse. Kevin hadn't felt like he'd needed to use so many words before because he'd been comfortable – and now he was distraught and clutching his little fingers around the denim of Joe's jeans like he could make him stay by sheer force of willpower alone.

He looked up at Patty, eyes wide and helpless, but he found only mirth there.

"It looks like you were missed," Patty said with a smile. "I'd listen to him if I were you."

Marcus tugged at Joe's shirt. Solemnly he said, "_Jag kommer att handboja oss tillsammans så att du inte kan lämna igen_."

The wail that Kevin started to let out was part-keening and part-gremlin, and Joe felt far too out of his depth. But Patty was just watching him, and he could see the rest of the Sharks eyeing him from down the hall but making no move to come closer – he recognized one of the goalies, and some of the European guys, but Burnzie and Pavs weren't there – and finally Joe had no option but to scoop Kevin up into his arms.

"Hey, hey, it's alright," he said, trying to bounce Kevin on his hip without dislodging Marcus. "Hey, look, I'm back!"

"Joe _left_!" Kevin snarled, and Joe was perhaps a little intimidated by the fury in his tiny, chubby face.

Joe winced. "I know, I'm sorry, but – I'm here!"

Apparently that didn't mean too much to Kevin – smart kid, probably shouldn't trust Joe to keep his word when he had already proven himself to be a massive fuck-up in the past two days, ignoring how he put them all in this mess. Kevin wrapped his bony arms around Joe's neck and pulled uncomfortably tight.

"Don't gooo," he whined with his wet, sticky face pressed to Joe's neck.

"I'm not going, I'm back!" But Kevin wasn't listening, and neither was Marcus, who was tugging on Joe's shirt again and staring up at him with big, sad eyes, and he lifted up one arm and fuck, Joe couldn't hold them both.

Patty was outright laughing now, leaning against the opposite wall of the hallway with one arm crossed over his chest and the other hand over his mouth, failing to hide his smile. He clearly was not planning to help, and so Joe had to slump to the floor, keeping Kevin propped on one side of him as Marcus scrambled into his lap.

It shut Kevin up, at least for the moment, probably because if Joe was sitting he knew that Joe couldn't walk away. Kevin settled his head on Joe's shoulder, thumb edging back into his mouth, and appeared to have cried himself out, hiccupping every few seconds as the last of his tears left him.

Marcus sat on Joe's thigh and leaned back against Joe's chest. He tipped his head back so that he could look at Joe upside down, his blonde hair falling like corn silk around him. "_Vi var rädda._"

While Joe didn't know what Marcus was saying, he figured he probably owed Marcus an apology too. "I'm sorry, bud," he sighed, rubbing Marcus's shoulder, "I didn't mean to scare you."

Even if Marcus didn't understand his words, maybe he understood the tone, because he looked satisfied with that, nestling back against Joe like he was settling down for a nap.

A glance down the hall showed that some of the Sharks were still watching, holding up what must have been their own cell phones, though Joe didn't know who they'd be talking to holding it in front of them like that. Patty was still across from him, watching him with warm eyes.

"Is this funny for you?" Joe asked, trying to keep his voice even.

Patty just kept smiling.

"Trust me, this is so in character not only for you but for _them_ with you that it's actually kind of expected."

"My linemates always sit in my lap?"

Joe meant it sarcastically, but Patty snorted and shook his head. "If you haven't let Kevin sit in your lap yet, he'd probably love it if you did. But you've probably had most of this team sit in your lap at some point so I'm betting it's already happened."

The heat crept over Joe's face without his permission, hot licks of embarrassment at even the sheer suggestion. He couldn't imagine it, being so blasé about – about _any of it _that he'd just invite people to drape themselves over him. He'd have to be pretty damn confident in himself, in his place with the team, not expecting to be rejected – or not caring if he was – and it was just so hard to picture.

Trying to save face, Joe bit back with, "Oh, and I'm sure you've sat in my lap dozens of times."

But Patty never stopped smiling, looking so painfully fond that his eyes were nearly shining with it.

"Perhaps a little closer to hundreds."

It was a blessing in disguise that Burnzie chose that moment to come barreling down the hall, because it saved Joe from the mortification of trying to piece together what circumstances could have led to Patrick Marleau allegedly being _very _familiar with sitting in his lap.

"You _little-_"

Burnzie literally skidded to a stop in front of Joe, chest heaving and eyes wild. He looked every part the feral mountain man, hair and beard sticking out every which way, fingers twitching like he couldn't decide if he wanted to hug Joe or strangle him.

He bit off his words and opened his mouth as if to speak again but stopped himself, exhaling heavily through his nose like a bull deciding if he should charge as he eyed Joe and the kids.

Finally he said in a low voice, "You are so lucky the kids are here right now because I am going to skin you alive."

Joe felt a frisson of fear skitter down his spine, and Kevin opened one eye to glare balefully at Burnzie, as if trying to decide if he should start yelling for being disrupted.

They were all saved by Patty's warm chuckle. "Well that's not very welcoming."

Burnzie slowly turned to look over his shoulder at him, and Joe watched as the two of them proceeded to have some sort of bizarre silent conversation consisting solely of eyebrows and the slightest of head tilts. It ended with Patty squeezing Burnzie's shoulder, and Patty's magic hands must have had that effect on everyone because it was like Burnzie deflated, shoulders dropping as he leaned into the touch. Burnzie scrubbed a tired hand over his face as if trying to compose himself and not doing a great job of it.

"Fuck, Joe, you scared the shit out of me," he croaked, and it was the fact that he swore like that in front of the kids that spoke more to Joe than his words themselves.

Everyone kept making out like Joe and Burnzie were really close. His mom had insisted up and down that they were best friends, and Patty talked about Burnzie like they were really familiar, like Burnzie would know him well. They had the same taste in beards, apparently.

It had felt like something he was being told before, a piece of information handed to him that he was expected to swallow and believe without any evidence. Sure, Burnzie had been fine, but Pavs was fine too, and some of the other guys, even if Joe didn't always remember their names. There had been nothing to make Joe think that there was anything special about his relationship with Burnzie compared to the rest of the team other than his mom's report, and his mom insisted on referring to Burnzie as "Brent," so Joe wasn't sure how well she actually knew him.

But it wasn't till right then, seeing Burnzie visibly slump with relief at Joe being safe, voice cracking with just how overwrought and terrified he'd been for Joe's wellbeing – for _Joe_, who'd been nothing but a little asshole the past two days and deserved nobody's concern for his own stupid decisions – that he really started to believe that maybe he and Burnzie were as close as everyone said.

"I'm sorry," Joe whispered, staring somewhere in the vicinity of Burnzie's arm before his gaze skittered away. Maybe staring at Burnzie's muscular, tattooed bicep wasn't the best thing to do when he was trying to compose himself and make a sincere apology.

"I wasn't...I wasn't really thinking. About anything." Or anyone. "I just felt so trapped, and I..."

He swallowed and looked down at his lap, but then he couldn't even look there, because Marcus was watching him with those big, guileless eyes, so trusting and not understanding a word of what was going on around him. He had no clue that Joe was just continuing to let everyone down.

"What's important is that you're safe now," Patty said gently, but there was steel in his voice as his eyes cut to Burnzie. After a moment of closing his eyes and breathing deeply, Burnzie sighed and nodded.

"We owe you an apology too," he said hoarsely. "For..." He trailed off, waved his hand uselessly. Patty nudged him in the side and raised his eyebrows.

"I guess this would have maybe been easier if we'd told the truth all along," Burnzie finally said. He looked down the hall as Pavs approached, looking just as haggard. Another guy was trailing after him with his arms crossed over his chest; Joe recognized him as the bitchy one who'd made fun of his hair that first day in the dressing room.

"Coach says skate is optional on account of us losing the alternate captain," Pavs said.

"More like having to search the fucking city for the alternate captain," the bitchy one muttered. His eyes were kind of weird, made more so as he scrutinized Joe as if he wasn't sure what to do with him.

"More like you guys took up too much time and now it's almost Toronto's turn to have the ice," Patty said primly. "And Logan, we were just apologizing to Joe for lying to him."

His tone stayed pleasant and easy, but nobody there was under the impression that Patty was particularly happy with the people present.

Logan – because apparently this was Joe's third best friend on the team, but he didn't exactly look excited to see Joe – grimaced and shifted from one foot to the other. "It's not like it was my idea," he mumbled.

"No, it was a team-wide exercise in stupidity." Patty spoke over Pavs and Burnzie, both of whom had started to protest, probably ready to lay blame. "All of you played along with this and made this whole thing more convoluted and more difficult for him, and so everyone owes Joe an apology."

Patty's voice rose as he spoke, as he clearly stared down the gaggle of Sharks players still gawking at them from the other end of the hall. All of a sudden they were all very busy and ducked out of the hallway.

When Patty gave Pavs one of his meaningful looks, Pavs sighed and rubbed the back of his head. "I'll get to them later," he muttered.

Apparently that was enough to satisfy Patty for now. He looked back at Logan, eyebrow raised.

Logan looked incredibly put upon as his eyes flickered over Joe; every time his gaze caught on Joe's face, it was like he winced.

_Really_ was not supporting this whole friendship theory.

"I _guess_..." Logan started to speak and then just heaved a big sigh and tilted his head like that was an acceptable way to end a sentence.

Patty looked two seconds away from smacking him upside the head. It was a distractingly good look for him.

And apparently it worked for Logan, because he looked at least mildly cowed. "I guess we could have done things better and I'm sorry if we made it worse," he mumbled dutifully, sounding every part the chastised elementary student. He still couldn't look Joe in the eye as he spoke, apologizing more to his shoulder than his face.

Everyone waited and it took Joe a moment to realize that they were expecting him to decide if Logan's apology passed-muster.

"It's fine," Joe muttered to Marcus's hair; two could play at this game, and Joe would bet that between the two of them he had the worse self-esteem.

Logan booked it out of there before anyone could make him say anything else.

Patty rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms, watching Logan flee.

"Wow. He is _really_ not taking this well."

"He stays up all night doing research." Pavs sighed, scratching at his scruff. "Calling guys all around the league too, to see if anyone knows something that could help. He wants this fixed ASAP."

It's not like Joe couldn't already imagine that his thirty-nine year old self had to be a lot more appealing than his eighteen year old self – after all, his older self was a good enough player to keep getting asked to come back every year, and his rookie self couldn't get asked to leave the press box – but it still hurt to have everyone talk about it so blatantly.

He didn't complain about it though – it would have been particularly pathetic of him if he had, after all – but apparently he was so bad at hiding his expressions that everyone knew his feelings all the same.

"Oh, dude, no, it's not personal," Burnzie rushed to say, his face scrunched up like whatever he was thinking about was upsetting. "Well, it is, but it's not like – he has nothing against _you_, or you at this age or whatever, it's just that he misses his dad."

What.

"What," Joe said.

"What?" Kevin shrieked, because apparently his naps were five minutes long and when he woke up, he _woke up_. Joe jumped, jostling both of the kids in his arms, and Marcus gave Kevin possibly the most betrayed expression that Joe had ever seen on a child.

Burnzie apparently found the whole sequence to be incredibly amusing, laughing some sort of big Paul Bunyan belly laugh, hands clutching his sides.

"Logan misses older-you," Patty said, his eyes shining with mirth. "You're basically his dad, he doesn't know how to handle himself without you there."

Joe tried very hard to not look like he was doing mental math, but he didn't do a very good job of hiding that one either, because Burnzie started into fresh peals of laughter, voice echoing loudly down the hallway.

"Dude, you're not his _actual_ dad," Pavs snorted. "You're an old man but you're not quite that old, and Cooch isn't quite that young."

"He was your rookie," Patty explained, because Patty always seemed to be the one who took mercy on him. "He looks up to you a lot and you guys have always been close. None of your rookies ever really stop being your rookies."

He nodded towards Kevin, who was now back to his favorite pastime of trying to stuff his whole hand inside of his mouth. "Case in point, that one is on year three and he still steals your shirts."

Joe didn't even try to modify his reaction that time. "He wears my clothes?"

"It's not like you wear them." Burnzie just barely got the words out, still choking back laughter.

"What's that supposed to mean?" It was so hard to be righteously indignant when Joe didn't know anything about his own life or this stranger he seemed to be now, but Joe was still working ardently to pull it off.

"It means you're a big fan of public nudity," Patty said, eyes gentle and sparkling and stupidly fond again.

"Shut the fuck up." Joe's face burned red like a button had been pressed on his embarrassment. It had been dumb of him to just play along with everything they told him about himself so far, but that lie was just too ridiculous for even someone as gullible as him to go along with.

"No, seriously." Pavs tapped at his weird cell phone-maybe-camera-thing and then turned it towards Joe, showing a picture of...that older version of Joe who looked like something straight out of the 1850s, beaming through what had to be a fake beard and utterly nude as he clutched his hands over his junk, and there was Burnzie right next to him, doing the same thing.

Burnzie's tattoos, it had to be noted, were even more distracting when seen all at once, and Joe was suddenly abruptly thankful that he only saw a brief glimpse before Kevin smacked him in the face with a spitty hand.

"That was our magazine cover," Burnzie said with pride.

"Why?" Joe tried to ask, but Kevin tried to stick his saliva-coated hand in Joe's own mouth and Joe had to shut up very quickly to prevent that from happening.

"Hey Bancer. Kev." Pavs waved the phone in front of Kevin's face, catching his attention. Kevin's eyes grew round and fascinated, as all small children were by a screen, and then they lit with excitement.

"JOE!" Kevin shrieked, waving his sticky, smacky hands around again as he tried to point at the screen, and its highly inappropriate image of Joe's bizarre redneck midlife crisis older self.

The smart thing to do would be for Pavs to save his ridiculously delicate-looking cell phone from Kevin's carnage – the kid did not exactly excel at fine motor skills and was more likely to drop or throw something of value than to hold it nicely – but that wasn't what Pavs did. Instead, the three of them, Pavs, Burnzie, and Patty, all seemed to freeze up and share one of those indecipherable looks.

"Do you know who that is, Kevin?" Pavs held the phone out to Kevin again, hopefully just out of hitting range.

"Joe! Joe, look, 's Joe!" He tugged on Joe's arm and then pointed at the phone before collapsing back against Joe's chest in a fit of giggles, apparently too overwhelmed by the sheer silliness of showing young Joe a picture of his older self. Marcus, intrigued by whatever had Kevin so excited, peered closer at the picture and then looked up at Joe, smiling slyly.

"_Du är så skallig nu_," he said, tapping at Joe's chin with one (thankfully dry) hand.

It was all very cute, or perhaps very scathing seeing as Joe had no clue what Marcus was saying, but it asked more questions than it answered.

"How do they know it's me?"

_Joe_ still wasn't fully convinced it was him, that he could somehow grow up to be this man with wrinkles lining his face and grey in his hair and even more in his frankly ridiculous beard (because the beard on the poster outside was ridiculous, and that one didn't appear to be fake at all even if the one in the picture was). Not only because it looked so different from how he was now – no floppy blonde hair, muscles that could actually fill out a shirt instead of hanging off him like hand-me-downs – but because the sheer confidence was so different.

The Joe in the picture did not give one single fuck how anybody viewed him, even if he was buck-ass naked on a magazine cover with his best friend.

That Joe was a long way off from who he was now, and yet the kids seemed to make the connection immediately.

Burnzie hummed and squinted, hand drifting to his chin like it really did help him to think when he stroked his beard. "You know, they knew your name without anybody telling them."

"Which is weird, because nobody here knew you when you were this young," Patty said slowly.

Pavs put the phone in his pocket and crossed his arms over his chest, tucking his hands in his armpits. "Could be part of the magic? However the wish was worded, maybe the kids knowing Joe is important to fixing things."

The whole magic thing was still even more foreign than the idea that Joe had magically "deaged" himself and his teammates because being a super-confident thirty-nine year old who all of his teammates looked up to was just too upsetting for him and he really wanted to try his hand at being a miserable rookie again.

"Yeah, so they know who to smack in the face for doing this to them," Joe muttered darkly. He was losing feeling in his legs from how the kids were settled in his lap, and so to their great irritation he started slowly shifting them both onto the floor. Marcus let himself be moved with a displeased expression and Kevin clung, clenching his tiny, spitty fists in Joe's shirt and whining loudly.

"_Joeee_." It was like a warning cry, high-pitched and tremulous and threatening to blow up if Joe didn't listen to him. "Don't _go_!"

"I'm not fucking going anywhere, _Jesus_," Joe hissed, trying to pry Kevin off of his shirt. "I'm just standing up!"

"Language," Pavs and Burnzie corrected simultaneously.

At least some of Joe's expressions still worked, because they both looked chagrined at Joe's flat stare. "If I'm really thirty-nine years old and these two brats are my linemates, then we can all handle saying fuck sometimes."

"Fuck," Marcus agreed solemnly.

Joe grimaced. "Not you, I'm not letting your first English word be a swear word, the Swedes will kill me."

"Nah, Erik will be so proud," Burnzie said, like Joe knew who Erik was. But at least he was being helpful, because Burnzie crouched down and scooped up Marcus in his arms, hoisting him into the air with a very put-upon groan.

"Gosh, what am I feeding you, rocks?" he asked Marcus, and Joe doubted Marcus understood it but he laughed all the same.

Burnzie started off down the hall with Marcus in his arms, calling back over his shoulder, "Come on, just because it's optional skate doesn't mean Coach won't bench us if we don't even show up at all!"

Nobody moved to help Joe, still trying to uncurl Kevin's hands from his shirt and failing miserably. In a fit of pique or a flash of genius, Joe tugged the shirt off over his head, letting it fall loose in Kevin's grip. Kevin, who had been pulling on the fabric with some force, fell right back on his ass. Everybody froze, expecting him to start having a meltdown, but instead Kevin laughed like he'd just won a great game and clutched the shirt to his chest.

"Mine," he sang, and then he made a truly challenged attempt to pull Joe's already-oversized shirt over his head. Pavs took that opportunity to swoop in and pick him up, shirt and all.

"Come on, bud, let's give Joe a break and go bother Dilly. I'm sure he'd love to give you a shirt too."

"Joe," Kevin cooed, buried in his pile of shirt, but he didn't fuss as Pavs carried him away.

For a moment it was just Patty and a shirtless Joe, standing there alone in the hallway, blinking and trying to comprehend what had just happened. And then Joe cut a sidelong glance at Patty and Patty was looking back.

"So this is how the nudity starts, eh?"

Joe made a noiseless sound of protest, but the mischievous curl to Patty's lips and the way it made his eyes crinkle took his words away.

"It's okay," Patty said, "It looks good."

He winked, actually fucking _winked_ like something out of a tv show, and then he stuck his hands in his pockets and started strolling off down the hall, easy-as-you-fucking-please.

"Wait, what?" Joe scrambled to follow after him, but Patty was going in a direction Joe didn't recognize – it must have been towards the visitors' dressing room.

"Kid steals your shirts all the time, it's fine!" Patty called back.

"I meant – the rest of it!" His traitorous heart had no reason to be beating so fast, especially not for a man he really didn't know well – one who, at least to this body, looked more than twice his age.

He could hear Patty laugh as he disappeared through an unmarked door. "Don't fish for compliments!"

And Joe was left standing there in the empty hallway, shirtless and inexplicably panting, with no more information about what was happening with his life and way too many new fantasies to jerk off to.

He was mildly proud of himself for finding his way back to the home dressing room, trying to trudge in as unobtrusively as a six-foot-four shirtless guy could manage.

Which lasted for all of two seconds before someone was saying, "Hey-hey! Jumbo's got his shirt off, everything's back to normal!"

Everybody laughed, and part of Joe still wanted to think it was a prank, but nothing about the laughter sounded mocking or mean. A few of the guys nudged Joe as he passed, smiling or trying to rub his hair, finding it utterly hilarious when he ducked away. He recognized the bearded goalie when he smiled kindly and asked, "Feeling more like yourself?"

Joe tried for a weak grin. He didn't think he quite made it. "If myself likes to be randomly topless for no reason."

"Oh, yourself _loves_ that," the goalie laughed. "All you need is the beard and you'll be good as new."

The way he said it, so happy and warm and simple, made Joe wish with all his might that things could be that way.

That's what he wished for, he realized as he slumped into the empty stall with his name on it. Maybe it wasn't what his older self wished for, but it's what he wanted now. He wanted to be this cool, funny, confident older Joe that everybody else knew, that everybody else seemed to like. The alternate captain they turned to for help, if Pavs and Logan were to be believed. He wanted to be that guy and play hockey as him and feel just as steady and self-assured on the ice as any other Olympic gold medalist.

Joe Thornton at thirty-nine may have been feeling every one of his years, and Joe was afraid to know what was going to happen to his knees that Patty made sound so ominous, but he sounded so settled in his skin, in his place in the world. He didn't sound like someone who walked around every day expecting to find criticism and disappointed frowns around every corner – and if he found them, he'd just take his shirt off and care even less about their opinions.

Being at the end of his career would suck, but it was a good career to be at the end of. Twenty-one years in the NHL? Most guys were lucky to get one.

Joe couldn't say that he truly wished to be almost forty, but he wanted to be the person that his older self came to be. That, he knew he wanted with his whole heart.

He closed his eyes and tried to center his mind on the idea, pulling out all of the meditation bullshit they'd taught for one hour on the first day of camp. He tried to slow his breathing and picture it, himself as this smiling, inexplicably nude and confident man who did not look at all like he had any regrets about his career or his life, even if he didn't have a Cup.

Maybe he didn't want to be old – he was terrified at the prospect of losing so many years of his life, his whole career, in just an instant – but that's what had already happened, wasn't it? He'd already gotten old. He'd already _had_ that career, and if and when he was his older self, he'd remember it. It felt scary because it was foreign to himself as a rookie, but his older self had done this all before.

Being thirty-nine wasn't losing his career – it was giving him back the career he'd already had, and the good and the bad that came with it. And maybe, if the Sharks kept signing him to those one-year contacts, the chance to keep going, if only for a little longer. If his body could keep it together.

But he'd never get a Cup if he stayed eighteen. He'd never even get on the ice again in the NHL or possibly anywhere else. Maybe Joe at eighteen wasn't exactly famous, but if he'd had the career that Patty alluded to – if he'd gone to the _Olympics_, and fuck, last Joe remembered those were literally still happening in Nagano a few days ago – then Joe was a recognizable guy, at least in hockey circles. People would recognize him getting a do-over and aside from the hysteria about magical deaging due to the ephemeral idea of "hockey gods," he was sure that some talking heads would have some opinions on how a repeat career wasn't very sportsmanlike or Canadian of him.

Twenty years may have passed, but hockey in 1998 functioned like 1978 and he didn't imagine the culture had changed that much since.

Joe couldn't have a life with hockey if he stayed eighteen. But if he was his older self again, he wouldn't just regain his past – he'd get a future too. He'd have a real life, not just this anxious bullshit where he babysits his linemates and gets teen angst all over his supposed best friends.

Maybe he'd stop having so many of those inappropriate erections when said best friends touched his arm, too.

And so Joe dragged all of those thoughts into the front of his brain and mashed them into a ball and he _pushed_, as hard as he could, imagined sending those thoughts out of his head and into the middle of the room, right into that Shark logo, pictured that mass of ideas and wishes becoming a reality, because it _had_ to be, not just for his sake but for Kevin and Marcus, too, because it wasn't just his career being lost but theirs, and Joe didn't want to feel this way but he especially didn't want this for them, and-

"Are you alright?" a quiet voice asked.

Joe opened his eyes.

His hands looked the same. He held them up in front of his face, turned them this way and that, but they didn't look different, more wrinkled or weathered or whatever a thirty-nine year old dude's hands were supposed to look like.

When he touched his chin, it was still beardless.

He was still eighteen.

"Joe."

He startled again, eyes snapping up to see the other goalie in front of him, the one without the beard. He was the one with the crazy eyes, Joe remembered, the ones that made Joe feel pinned down and also as if he was being stared through. Not that it helped when Joe didn't really know anything else about him.

"Martin Jones," the goalie said quietly, as if he was reading Joe's mind. A goalie with eyes like that? Maybe he was.

"Are you okay?" he asked again.

Joe grimaced and shrugged. He didn't want to lie, at least not to a goalie; everyone knew that a good relationship with your goalie could make or break your place on the team. And besides, if anyone would know anything about magic hockey wishes, Joe imagined it would be a goaltender.

"I was trying to wish myself back to normal," he said quietly, hopefully quiet enough that the other guys still milling around the dressing room wouldn't hear him. Some of them had gone out on to the ice to skate, but others had left, maybe for the weight room. There was still the big guy with overly gelled hair on the other side of the room, letting the kids climb all over him, but cutting frequent glances over at Joe and Martin in a completely unsubtle way.

"That's Dilly," Martin said, following Joe's gaze. "He's the idiot who told you we adopted the kids, so it's his job to help take care of them." After a moment he added, "Not that he wouldn't have wanted to do it anyways; he loves kids."

And then Martin turned those wide, blank eyes back on Joe and said, "You love kids too, but I don't get the impression you like being one."

If someone like Burnzie had said that, Joe would have chafed immediately at being called a kid. But in this instance it felt accurate: he felt new and naive and too young and vulnerable and God, he wanted someone to swoop in and fix his problems for him, even if that had to be his mom.

Might as well call a spade a spade.

"I just want things to go back to normal," Joe whispered. "I want to play hockey and be happy and confident and be that guy in the pictures. I don't – I don't want a fresh start if it means losing that. And I was trying to do the wish, like Patty said, and mean it with my whole heart..."

"But clearly it didn't work."

It wasn't mean, the way that Martin said it, more like it was just a general observation. Like he was narrating a nature film

He settled himself onto the bench next to Joe with a sigh that was far too weary for someone who looked fairly young and limber.

Martin dragged his palms back and forth over his mesh athletic shorts for a moment, chewing over his words, and then he turned and faced Joe with the full brunt of that stare.

"You know I won the Cup once," he said quietly.

Joe twitched, eyebrows flying up. "Really?"

"Mhmm." Martin's face twisted into something like a soft smile, if that could encompass an expression that was grim and wistful and fond all at the same time. "With my last team. My first year in the NHL. I had a good year for a rookie – got called up from the minors when the starter got injured and basically ran the regular backup out of his job. Had two good playoff games out of it, enough to qualify for a Cup."

Joe stared at him. "Uh, yeah, I'd say that's a good year."

It was the most unbelievably successful year imaginable, to someone with Joe's shitty first-year track record.

But Martin's bittersweet smile gave him pause.

"It was. But it's not the way I'd wanted it."

After a moment, it clicked for Joe.

"Do you mean you wished for it?" he asked in a hushed tone.

Martin shrugged. "Not any more than any other hockey player, I don't think. And they say that supposedly wishes for the Cup don't work, but it's not like you can scientifically test it. But it was definitely the pipe dream that any rookie goalie would want: coming up from the AHL and decisively proving you deserve to be in the show, getting a taste of the playoffs and winning the Cup all in one go. Hell, I did well enough the next year that I played myself right out of town and into a starting position here. Maybe I'd have liked a few more regular season games as a rookie, but I got a pretty great start."

A flash of teeth in the smile then. "But it's not how I would have wanted it. You think you'll take a Cup any way you can get it, and that's true – there's not a moment of it that I'd regret or give back. But nobody has the storybook career they wished they could have. We get parts of it, often not in the order we wanted or the way we thought we'd get them. Look at you: your rookie year sucked, you turned it around and became captain in Boston, Boston fucked you over and you turned it around and became captain here and had a fucking great career."

Joe's stomach dropped out.

"I'm the captain?" he hissed, mind flashing to the C on Pavs's jersey.

Martin waved a hand dismissively, like this was inconsequential. "So was Patty. Everyone's been captain in San Jose, now it's Pavs. Trust me, you'd think you'd be upset about it but you love Pavs so much that you're not. That's a story for another day. What I'm saying is that you've had an awesome career – you're going to be in the Hall of Fame, you and Patty both, everyone knows it. But that awesome Hall of Fame career probably isn't exactly the one you pictured at eighteen, just like I didn't imagine getting the Stanley Cup and only playing two playoff games. The things that we want don't always come to us in the way that we expected them. And sometimes the things we want aren't what's best for us – and what we get isn't exactly what we wanted, but it's better in the end."

He planted his hands on the wooden bench behind him and leaned back, stretching his shoulders as he did it. "That's the point of these wishes, you know. Teaching people to appreciate what they have, helping them realize that they were already in the place they're meant to be. Showing them that getting the thing you want isn't always good for you, and that what you think is failure could actually lead you to better things. It's all about learning lessons."

Joe mulled that over as Martin went silent, staring resolutely at the logo in the middle of the floor and trying to pretend that Dilly wasn't still gawking at them very openly from across the room.

"I think I learned my lesson," Joe said quietly. When Martin didn't say anything, Joe continued, "I don't – I appreciate who I was, when I was older. It's not what I expected, but he has a good life, and I want that. So I don't know why the wish isn't working."

It was like magnetism, or maybe some repressed part of Joe's older self who knew how to read his goalie, but somehow he knew to look over at Martin just as Martin's head tilted towards him. There was a soft smile playing on Martin's lips now, something almost mischievous – a look that Joe had been taught to be wary of on any goalie.

"Well that's just it," Martin said, one eyebrow cocking upwards. "Because I'd like to say I know your older self pretty well, and he's pretty damn pleased with his life. Maybe he wishes his knees didn't give him such a hard time, but he loves this team and what he's achieved with this franchise. And despite what everyone else keeps saying, I find it really hard to believe that he'd genuinely wish to start it all over."

There was something in the way he said it, maybe less of a sound than an impression, a vague notion of something happening in the background of Martin's words. As if Martin's words had somehow evoked memories of a tinkling wind chime, of a soft breeze.

As if something in Joe's brain was sitting up and telling him that this was important, that this was the right way to go.

As if that something was perhaps tinged with just a little magic.

Slowly, quietly, Joe asked, "If I didn't wish to start over, then what did I wish for?"

Martin's eyes were bright with mirth and perhaps something else. "That's just it. I don't think you made the wish at all. There's nothing that I could imagine Joe Thornton wishing for so strongly that the hockey gods took notice. Everyone was so quick to assume, because you're the only one who came out of this anywhere close to an adult, and you're nearing the end of your career. But if I had to guess..."

He canted his head forward, just the slightest bit, and Joe was almost afraid to look, even though he knew what was on the other side of the room.

He was sure Martin wasn't talking about Dilly.

"You don't think...the _kids_?"

Martin did that weird head tilt again, both a yes and a no at the same time. "It's a hunch. It would be one of you three, and between knowing you and hearing what you've said to me now, I don't think it was you who made that wish. But if we're looking at who would feel really strongly about you getting to start your career over, who would wish for nothing more than having years and years to play hockey with you..."

He trailed off, but he didn't need to draw Joe a map to his conclusion.

The answer was right there on the other side of the dressing room, veritably swaddled in Joe's t-shirt as he rolled around on the floor at Dilly's feet, trying to unthread his shoelaces and giggling hysterically when Dilly tried to nudge him away.

It wasn't both of the kids. Poor Marcus was probably just collateral in all of this, stuck on a successful line with two weirdos at opposing ends of their careers.

But as Martin spoke, Joe couldn't help but think that there was some validity to his biggest fan wishing that Joe was younger so they could play together forever – and the "hockey gods" deciding to give him what he wanted, but not in the way he imagined it.

"Kevin," Joe said flatly.

The toddler in question gave up on tugging Dilly's shoelaces from their holes and instead started trying to cram as much of the laces into his mouth as he could before Dilly yanked them away.

Martin smiled serenely and sighed.

"Kevin."

Dilly succeeded in sweeping Kevin into his lap, where he promptly started to scream at having his new toys taken away. Marcus, who was wearing Dilly's helmet, came over and handed Kevin a puck. Kevin promptly shut himself up when he stuffed the puck into his own mouth.

"I'm fucked," Joe said.

"Yep," Martin agreed. "But at least they're cute about it."

Kevin looked across the locker room at Joe and positively _beamed_, if it was possible to light up and smile with a chunk of vulcanized rubber in your mouth.

Yeah. Definitely fucked.

They shared the theory with the rest of the team when everyone filtered back into the dressing room for some sort of strategy meeting to prep for the game that night – the game that apparently the other backup goalie, Aaron Dell, would be starting in, which was the only reason Martin would have hung out with Joe all through practice.

Well, that and because Martin claimed it was his "job" to help Joe, and refused to elaborate any further on what that might mean.

"Alternate captain-goalie confidentiality," he said, and Joe almost believed his apologetic tone except he was so full of shit.

"You don't have to keep things about me confidential _from me_," Joe protested, but Martin just smiled that toothy grin.

"That's so cute," he said, patting Joe's cheek and wandering back to his own stall.

Joe wasn't sure what that whole interaction had been, but Burnzie and the Swedish-pirate-who-was-apparently-Erik-who-swore-a-lot thought that it was fucking _hilarious_.

"This isn't funny," Joe told the dressing room at large. "How are we going to convince a toddler to wish us back to normal?"

The smiley European kid crouched down in front of Kevin, who was now rolling around on the floor, still gnawing on the puck.

"Bancer," he said, "Please wish Jumbo back to bearded old man. Thank you."

As if they really thought that would work (and maybe they did, hockey players weren't known for being Rhodes Scholars), everybody stood there for a few seconds and waited to see if anything would change.

Kevin pulled the slobbery puck out of his mouth and lobbed it at somebody's knee; it missed by a mile, but Kevin still laughed himself silly and crawled over to it so he could stick it back in his mouth.

The European kid turned to Joe with a mournful look. "I tried."

"We don't _know_ that it's Bancer," said the European guy with the eyebrows – Timo, Burnzie had said. "Maybe it's Marcus."

Erik-the-Swedish-pirate eyed up his tiny blonde charge, who was still running around wearing Dilly's helmet. "Marcus, _önskade du att alla skulle vara unga igen?_"

Marcus's head cocked to the side in thought, causing the helmet to tilt over his face. He fumbled it back up his forehead, but it still drooped into his eyes.

_Nej, jag önskade en drake. Tror du att det kommer att vara här i tid för min födelsedag?"_

"It wasn't him," Erik said.

A throat cleared loudly at the front of the room. "Not that this isn't all fascinating, but is anyone actually planning to play hockey tonight?"

They all looked especially guilty as the coach eyed them each individually. He had a particularly unimpressed expression for Joe, saying, "Joe. Glad you could join us. Next time you want to have a fit of teenage rebellion, do you think you could do it outside of practice time?"

Joe's face turned scarlet as he quickly dipped his gaze to the floor, but the guy in the stall next to him whose face was slightly reminiscent of a mouse jostled him gently with his arm, and when Joe chanced a glance up nobody seemed particularly bothered with him, not even the coach. He wondered what his mother would have to say about Peter's comments.

The conversation moved on to the game at hand, talking strategy about how to deal with a whole bunch of Leafs players who Joe didn't know.

He wouldn't know most of the league now, he realized. If he was turning forty in a few months, had been in the league for twenty-one years, the chances that anyone older than him was still playing were pretty low. Was there anyone left, other than him and Patty?

The coach kept talking about the set plays for that night, but Joe wasn't playing and his mind was a million miles away – or perhaps twenty-one years ago.

It was a bizarre, alienating thing, to realize that you might be one of the last of your kind. To discover that you were an endangered species, a dying breed, being replaced and outplayed every year by young kids who were faster, stronger, smarter than you.

Sure, it was the nature of hockey and sports as a whole. By the time most guys reached veteran status, they were being kept around less for their skill and more for their ability to train up the new kids to replace them and do a better job at it. He'd seen it even in his brief time in Boston.

That's probably who he was now. Nearly forty and playing with two kids who were perhaps adults on paper, but would always be kids in comparison to him. He was their mentor, their caretaker until they did well enough on their own that they didn't need him anymore. Until he'd outlived his usefulness and became obsolete.

But his older self didn't seem to even mind that so much, being the last of his kind, everyone on the team being probably at least five years younger than him, now that Patty was gone. He didn't see to mind that he was training up his own replacements.

To be fair, if all of his rookies were people like Logan and Marcus and Kevin, maybe they didn't quite outgrow him as management may have expected, even if they didn't technically need him anymore.

He'd found something special in San Jose, bonds that he couldn't have imagined as that scared, disappointing kid in Boston.

Joe would rather be the last old man any day than go back to being that lost kid. He may be nearing retirement and the end of his usefulness, but he wouldn't be lonely.

He was quiet as the team finished whatever their meeting was, everyone standing up and milling off to do their own thing, some going to finish a workout or shower if they hadn't, others making lunch plans.

Burnzie appeared at his side like he'd never left, watching Joe carefully and not pretending for one second that he wasn't.

"You okay?" he asked quietly.

Joe didn't try that hard to make his smile look less like splintered glass.

"It's just a lot. This whole day, and it's barely gone anywhere. If Kevin's really the one who made the wish..."

And God, just a few hours ago he didn't even know about this whole wishing bullshit.

A big, warm hand landed on his back, smoothing up between his shoulder blades and resting on the back of his neck, and Joe leaned into it without a thought, like it was something he was used to. Maybe he was – if Joe was that big of a fan of nudity and having people sit in his lap, then he was probably used to his friends being handsy with him in return.

(Thankfully, he was at least too tired and distracted for his body to get _too_ excited about someone touching him.)

"We'll figure it out." Burnzie's voice was gentle and sure, soothing, and Joe leaned into his touch because he couldn't not.

"But what about the team? You guys have a game tonight, and you have to have road trips coming up soon."

Burnzie's expression got a little tight. "Tonight will be fine. Cat's out of the bag, so it's up to you if you want to hang out here or stay at my place. But you really would have to stay in the lounge and watch the broadcast feed – we can't have the press spotting you guys. Or have you wandering off again."

"I know," Joe mumbled to the carpet, and Burnzie squeezed his neck again.

"It's not all on you; we fucked up a lot too. We all fucked up..." Here he tensed a little, actually looked away from Joe.

"We do have an away game in three days," he said quietly. "In Minnesota. Then we go to Winnipeg and Calgary before we come back home. We're supposed to leave in two days, early morning flight."

There was nothing positive about that wording. "Supposed to?"

There was, Joe realized, a quality about Burnzie's eyes that he shared with Patty: they were both painfully genuine, and utterly arresting when they wanted to be.

"We have to decide what we're going to do with you guys," Burnzie said quietly, like the words pained him. "We thought we'd get this solved in just a few days, make up lies for the press about how you all caught the same cold and then have you back on the ice in no time. But that was when we thought that we just had to get _you_ to wish things back to normal. If Jonesy's right, and he's almost never wrong...this could be a while."

Reading between the lines wasn't hard: if they had to convince a toddler to make a genuine, ephemeral wish to magically jump forward twenty-one years, there was a strong chance that this wasn't getting fixed any time soon.

"You need someone to babysit us while you're away," Joe said slowly. It stung, but it made sense. It would be a lot harder to keep Joe and the kids under wraps if they were traveling with the team, ignoring how difficult it would be to play a hockey road schedule with two young children and a confused teenager in tow.

He didn't like the way that Burnzie's lips pressed together, like he was trying to swallow down something toxic and bitter.

"Maybe," Burnzie said slowly. "But some of the administrative guys have been talking about – if this drags on, we don't know how long it might take. And there aren't exactly professionals who handle this sort of thing, because even for hockey it's not every day guys get turned into toddlers. And while you're eighteen and you would probably be okay staying here, people have suggested that if this goes on much longer, we may have to send the kids back with their parents."

Joe's heart didn't actually stop beating and leap into his throat; it just felt like it did.

"Send them back?"

"It's just an idea," Burnzie rushed to say, but his expression said it was more than just a passing thought. "Everyone's main focus is getting you guys back to normal. But if we can't figure it out...well, you even said, it's fucked up that we've got a bunch of English-speaking guys trying to raise a Swedish kid, and Kevin's so young... Their parents would obviously be able to handle them better than we could."

They both looked at the kids on the other side of the room, Marcus now trying on Aaron's goalie pads and Kevin playing his weird little car crash game with the smiley European guy, who made himself explode in spectacular fashion.

"We're doing okay," Joe said, because someone should say it.

"We are. But they deserve better than okay, if they're really going to be stuck going through all of this again."

The words curled like rusted nails around Joe's lungs.

"All of it?" he breathed, voice thin and strangled. "So I'd – we'd lose everything?"

He wouldn't be able to start over - at least not as a hockey player. He'd lose hockey, and with it he'd lose that confident Joe Thornton who didn't give a shit what anyone thought of him. He'd lose that camaraderie with the team. He'd probably lose whatever friends he had here; they might deal with him now because he was an eighteen year old version of their friend, but they wouldn't like him if he _continued_ to be an eighteen year old version of their friend, quite notably the _worst_ version of their friend.

"Not everything," Burnzie said quickly, "We're working on-"

"I'd probably have to move back to St. Thomas," Joe murmured.

"_No!_"

The fierceness of Burnzie's disapproval took Joe aback, actually made him step away from Burnzie and out of his grasp. Burnzie's face immediately flooded with remorse, but his eyes had a flash of something wild in them.

"No," he said more quietly, "It's not going to come to that. It's just – the front office is talking about it, but it's not going to happen. We have time. We'll fix this."

Except they didn't know how they'd do it, and perhaps the coaches didn't quite mind having them around (they probably just wanted their players back), but eventually someone would be upset that there were two useless kids and one reject rookie trailing the team. It was cute to see the guys playing with the kids for now, but soon people would be complaining that it was a distraction to the team, and then...

Joe verbalized that thought, "We're a distraction to the team."

"You _are_ the team." Burnzie's hands came back up, both of them now resting on Joe's shoulders, stepping into his space and tipping his face down until their foreheads nearly touched. It was overwhelming and a little intimidating, being in such an intimate position where Joe could feel Burnzie's warmth emanating into the space between them _because Joe was still shirtless and his dick definitely remembered that_ – and yet. At the same time, it felt safe. It felt normal, and right. And if anyone on the team noticed, they didn't think it was anything outside of the norm.

"You are the team," Burnzie murmured. "All three of you. We're going to take care of you as a team, and we're going to fix this as a team, and nobody's going anywhere."

He said it like an oath, like a promise signed in blood and sealed with something much older, and in the face of that conviction, Joe was helpless to do anything but believe him.

"Okay," Joe whispered, trapped in Burnzie's eyes. "What do we do now?"

Maybe he'd been around hockey players for too long, or maybe it was his unfortunate attraction to particular individuals, but Joe felt a flush of comfort and a spark of giddiness at Burnzie's gap-toothed smile.

"Now, we go home and take a nap."

It wasn't the worst idea in the world.

Joe told Burnzie on the way home that he'd rather stay home with the kids than have to deal with them at the arena during a game. For one, there were way too many opportunities for them to get lost and for another, he didn't want to have to wait until nearly midnight to get them into bed.

Burnzie made them a variation of chicken and pasta for dinner, and he finally showed Joe how to work his gigantic flat-screen tv, now that he was admitting that Joe wasn't concussed and he only wasn't allowed to watch tv before to keep him from realizing the year.

"It's called an LCD screen, by the way," Burnzie said with a rather cheeky grin. "Plasma is outdated now."

Joe was both impressed, and suddenly very nostalgic for his parents' behemoth console television.

Burnzie got the tv set up on the right channel for the game, and Joe figured he'd leave it there. Kevin and Marcus would hopefully be suitably enthralled by a hockey game because Joe didn't want to have to try to find what channel showed cartoons.

The suit that Burnzie came downstairs wearing sure was...something. It was a satiny blue plaid number, with a darker blue waistcoat underneath and topped with an entirely incongruous green camouflage Sharks toque.

"Wow," Joe said, because he didn't have other words for that ensemble as his brain tried to restart itself.

Burnzie flashed him a toothless grin, tongue poking out between the gap in his teeth.

"Don't be jealous because I look so good. Especially when I brought you a gift."

He tossed Joe something that he caught more on instinct than out of actual intent. For a moment Joe was confused, and then his face broke into a smile.

"My Game Boy!" He was sure it was his, because the grey plastic was scuffed in the corner from where it had fallen down some stairs when his brother tried to wrestle it from him, and the cartridge was his Pac-Man game. It looked just like he remembered it-

"Wait. I got this for my thirteenth birthday. Are you telling me-"

Burnzie was already rolling his eyes, but his lips were curling into a fond smile. "It's the same one, it still works, you use it on every road trip, you still play like the same two fucking games all the time, and yes, it is nearly twenty-seven years old."

"Huh. Well, there's no messing with perfection."

Marcus was clamoring up onto the giant sectional couch next to Joe, making grabby hands at the Game Boy and asking something that sounded like _Mario_.

"Christ," Burnzie muttered, but he was still smiling as he crouched down to open the cabinet under the tv and pulled out a box, which he set on the coffee table. "Here. These are the rest of your games, I know you've got some Super Mario stuff in there."

Marcus didn't need an invitation to start excitedly digging through the box, and Joe had to gently steer Kevin away from it to keep him from putting one of the cartridges in his mouth.

"Why are my games here?" Joe asked.

Burnzie shot him a weird sideways look. "Because you like to keep a lot of your stuff here."

Joe wanted to push for more, but he thought he'd just keep getting weird non-answers. So he let Burnzie go on his way, and Marcus and Joe took turns playing Super Mario Land until the hockey game started.

The pregame coverage included interviews with Patty, who was heralded as a returning hero even if he played with the opposition. Joe realized with a pang that Patty was probably leaving after the game and he wouldn't get a chance to see him again to say goodbye; he didn't know why it struck him so deeply, when he didn't have true memories of their friendship, but if he'd known that their earlier interaction was a goodbye, he would have at least thanked Patty more.

It was even weirder when the broadcasters threw up images of Joe's bearded self, next to pictures of a man with extremely straight gelled blonde hair, and a younger guy with dark hair, blue eyes, and a pointed jaw that Joe was intimately familiar with because it was currently digging into his arm as Kevin draped himself over Joe's side.

"The entire Thornton line is still mysteriously out on IR," said the broadcaster. "The trio hasn't been spotted at practice in days, and the team is being very tight-lipped about what's going on."

"Yes, evidently the three of them have caught the same cold, and they're trying to stay home to keep the rest of the team from getting sick," the other broadcaster said. "And we wish them all the best for a speedy recovery, because it has to be a devastating blow to this team to lose such a productive line in the midst of the playoff push."

"And that really has been the story," the first guy said, "On paper this looks like a line that was just tossed together, but when these three are on the ice together, passes connect and everyone's scoring. You know the Sharks can't wait to get them back in the action."

They continued on talking about other things, about San Jose's power play or the recent struggles of Toronto's goaltender. But Joe was still stuck thinking about those three pictures on the screen, that old man with his American Civil War beard and those two younger guys who somehow came together to form a dynamic line with him.

"We gotta fix this, guys," Joe said quietly. Marcus continued to lounge on the couch next to him, tongue poking out between his teeth as his tiny fingers smashed the game buttons. Kevin ran one of his toy cars off of Joe's knee and quietly crashed it into Joe's kidney.

Evidently they weren't as worried about this as Joe was.

The game itself was fast. Like, intimidatingly fast, and Joe wasn't sure he could ever keep up with them now, let alone as an old man with bad knees. Supposedly he did, if his line was as good as the broadcasters made it out to be, but he didn't know how he managed it.

And apparently they didn't have ties now? The game should have ended in a 2-2 tie, but instead, they had a shootout like they did at the Olympics. He wasn't sure if he felt worse for the goalies, or for his future self who had to participate in those shootouts.

The kids did admirably well at staying awake throughout the game. Marcus split his attention between the hockey game and the game in his lap, eventually listing closer and closer to Joe's side until he fell asleep with his head slumped against Joe's leg. Kevin nearly had a conniption fit when he realized they were watching a hockey game and almost flung his racecar through the television screaming, "HOCKEY, JOE! HOCKEY!"

(The racecar was temporarily confiscated until Kevin seemed less liable to throw it when he got excited.)

Kevin spent most of the first period bouncing around the floor in front of the tv, pretending to wind up to take slapshots and falling on his ass every single time. Joe had to appreciate his work ethic, because he just kept getting right back up and trying again, muttering incomprehensibly to himself the entire time.

He started to flag during the first intermission, but got a second wind when the next period started. By the third he was mostly unconscious, waking up only when Joe cheered to celebrate Pavs's game-tying goal, muttering, "Goal, Joe."

Joe was the only one still awake to see the smiley European guy (Tomáš Hertl, he finally had a name now) score the winning shootout goal.

By the time the postgame interviews came on, Joe was scooping Kevin into his arms and gently shaking Marcus's shoulder to coax him up the stairs to bed. He'd thankfully gotten the kids changed into their pajamas before the game even started, so all he had to do was enforce some sloppy, half-assed teeth-brushing and dump them off in bed. He didn't even try putting them anywhere other than his room, because he knew they'd just show up there later anyways.

Joe had planned to wait up for Burnzie, had only laid down on the bed next to the kids so that he could keep an eye on them (and God, was it easier thinking of them as "the kids" and not considering that he was sharing a bed with his lineys), but the next thing he knew, the sun was shining through the blinds, Kevin was drooling on Joe's chest, and someone had pulled the sheets up over Joe's shoulders.

His chest felt warm. He told himself it was because of the drooly furnace draped across his front.

By the time Joe had finished in the bathroom and dug up some clean clothes, Burnzie had come through and gotten the kids up. They were all downstairs having breakfast, Marcus rubbing at his eyes and looking sleepy enough to faceplant in his scrambled eggs while Kevin took great relish in squeezing hunks of egg in his fists until they came out between his fingers, instead of actually eating them.

Burnzie greeted Joe with a wave of his fork before he went back to trying to actually get some of the food inside of Kevin's mouth. Joe gladly dodged that bullet and made his own plate instead, staring intensely at the toaster because he could only focus on one thing at a time right now.

"There's coffee in the-" Burnzie started to speak, but Joe was already trailing over to the coffeepot, announcing, "I love you."

Burnzie snorted. "That's what you always say."

If it was later in the day and Joe was more conscious, he might be highly concerned about what that meant. But he was tired, and it was a slow morning, and he didn't bother to ask.

They had all been seated and were eating in companionable silence when Burnzie said, "We're leaving for Minnesota tomorrow morning."

Joe grimaced, his appetite rapidly fleeing him. "What's going to happen to us?"

He knew that Burnzie was carefully watching for his reaction, but he couldn't rein it in no matter how hard he tried.

"Simmer's on IR, so we're thinking we'll have you guys stay with him for a bit."

Joe blinked. "Which one is that?"

"European murder-eyes."

"Oh fuck."

"Fuck," Marcus agreed.

Burnzie shook his head, hiding a smile in Kevin's hair as he tried in vain to wipe Kevin's hands on a paper towel. "He's not that bad. Seriously, you love him to bits. I'm not even exaggerating."

"According to you I love every person on that team."

"You _do_," Burnzie insisted, his eyes sparkling. "You like, exude positivity and love for your teammates. And you think that Simmer is funny. Which he is, once you get his sense of humor."

"You literally just described him as _murder-eyes_."

"Because I knew you'd know who I meant," Burnzie said with a wave of his hand. "He doesn't actually murder people. Well. He loves you, so he definitely wouldn't murder you. He's just pretty quiet. It's just because his English isn't great. Hell of a d-man though."

"And because he likes to _murder people_," Joe insisted.

Burnzie scooped Kevin up, apparently giving up on wiping him clean and deciding that a bath was in order once the eggs went into his hair. "Please, he hasn't murdered a single person since he came to the US."

Joe's eyes widened as Burnzie sauntered off down the hall with Kevin in his arms.

"_Since he came to the US?!_"

There was, of course, no reply.

Joe turned his anxious gaze on Marcus.

"Fuck," Marcus said sweetly.

Joe agreed.

The Sharks had a full practice that day, apparently because once they hit Minnesota the next morning they'd have the rest of the day off save for a team dinner. It was a closed practice, no press allowed, meaning that Joe and the kids got to sit out on the bench as the guys skated.

It was a weird experience. Well, not the being-stuck-on-the-bench part. Joe was really, really good at holding down the bench while he watched everybody else skate, at this point.

But watching what was supposed to be his team out there, skating and running drills that Joe should know and absolutely didn't, it was a strange experience. It was even weirder to be able to sit on the bench, but not have his gear on. Even if he only played five minutes a game in Boston, he got to put his skates on.

The kids at least were behaving themselves – well, as best as they could. Kevin's racecars kept going over the boards, and the guys on the ice kept scooping them up to bring them back to him, which of course meant that Kevin kept sending more of them off the boards because he liked to watch the guys play fetch.

During a practice of special teams Erik missed a pass and shouted, "_Fuck you, Erik!_", evidently aimed at himself.

Marcus replied with a hearty, "Fuck!"

Erik was fucking tickled. "That's my _boy_!"

All Joe wanted to know was why he got such a hard time for cursing in front of the kids when everybody else was allowed to encourage it. Especially when everyone else knew all along that the kids were actually adult hockey players who had undoubtedly heard and said worse in their lifetimes.

It was as practice was winding down, and some guys started to skate off while others lingered to work on specific things with the coaches, that Joe asked Pavs when he approached the bench to get a drink, "Do you think I could skate for a bit?"

Pavs thought about it for a moment, draining half of his water bottle in one go as he did. When he came up for air he shrugged and said, "Yeah, I don't see why not. Your regular skates should fit okay."

And Joe scrambled off the bench and made for the dressing room, because his stall may have been empty of practice gear, but he knew his skates were still there.

The skates in his stall looked nothing like the ones that Joe wore with the Bruins. It made sense – after twenty years of innovation he'd expect gear to look at least a little different than in 1998. They fit okay, though, even if they felt a little like they were molded for someone else's feet. If his knees were as fucked at thirty-nine as everyone said, who knew what shape his feet were in after two decades of professional hockey.

None of this stopped Joe from lacing the skates up as fast as he could, rucking up the bottom of his jeans around the top of the boot. He grabbed the gloves atop the stall and started back down the hallway, pausing when he saw the sheer number of sticks set up against the wall. Those _definitely_ did not look the same as 1998.

"Ahem."

Joe startled when a man he didn't recognize in a Sharks-emblazoned polo – equipment staff, most likely – offered him a black CCM stick with his name printed in white on the shaft.

Good to know he hadn't changed brands, then.

He thanked the man with probably his biggest smile since waking up twenty-one years in the future and took his stick with him onto the ice.

Part of him was stupidly worried that he'd somehow forgotten to skate in the past few days, like the change in decade or body or whatever was going on would have destroyed his ability to play hockey, even though both versions of himself were in the NHL.

But that first step on the ice was absolutely flawless. The surface might have been a little chippy from practice, but Joe didn't even notice, gliding across the ice as easy as breathing.

"Looking good, Jumbo!" someone called out, and Joe would have flipped them off if he could, but he was too busy focusing on the puck that had just been sent his way by a guy with a slightly nervous smile – one of the Swedes who talked to Marcus a lot.

Joe caught the puck neatly on the toe of his stick and looked up at the guy.

"Thanks...?" He trailed off, wincing when he realized that he still didn't know at least half of his teammates' names.

"Melker," the guy said, and then his smile got a little bigger as he added, "The better Karlsson."

Erik-the-Swedish-pirate came barreling across the ice from where he'd been talking with Burnzie, making a wholly unattractive squawking sound of protest. Given the fact that he was almost intimidatingly handsome, it was nice to have proof that not everything about him was perfect.

"Don't you put fucking lies into his head!" Erik barreled into Melker, but Melker seemed to have expected it, giggling helplessly and squirming away as Erik tried to catch him in a headlock. "Joe, I'm the best Karlsson and we all know it!"

Before Joe could think of a reply, a familiar wail floated across the ice.

"_Joe!_"

Kevin was trying to climb over the boards, while the guy who looked vaguely mouselike used his stick to gently prod him back.

"_Joe!_" he yelled again, face turning red and looking close to a spectacular screaming fit. "Joe, _skate!_"

Well, his ten seconds of freedom had been nice. With a sigh, Joe abandoned his puck and skated over to the bench.

"I'm sorry, bud, we don't have skates to fit you guys," the mouse guy was saying. "If you want me to hold you I could take you out-"

"_No!_" The look that Kevin gave him was absolutely withering.

"Goody, I don't think Bancer wants to be your friend anymore," Eddie snickered. But he still plucked Kevin up and placed him back on the ground behind the boards, even if Kevin bitched and squirmed the whole time.

"Joe!" he barked. "Joe, skate!"

Marcus was at the boards right next to him, little arms propped up on top as he tried to lean over them. "Joe, _kan vi spela hockey nu?_"

You didn't need to know Swedish to figure those words out.

"We don't have skates for you," Joe said, shaking his head to make sure Marcus got it. He still felt bad when the kid deflated, slumping against the boards but at least not carrying on like Kevin, who was now on the brink of tears and making grabby hands at Joe.

"_Joe! _Joe, hockey! With me!" Kevin flubbed the _th_ sound, but the words were still understandable.

Joe might start to prefer the guys calling him Jumbo, if it meant he could stop hearing his name so much.

"Christ, whatever. Come here." He dropped his gloves and his stick and leaned over the boards to pick Kevin up. Kevin's tears immediately dried up, naturally. A moment later Eddie swung Marcus over the boards, holding onto his tiny hands to keep him from falling as he stood him on the ice.

"Joe, hockey," Kevin insisted, pointing down at Joe's stick.

This was going to be exhausting.

"We can't play hockey, Kev. We're too little."

It killed Joe to phrase it that way, to include himself with Kevin and Marcus, but it wasn't wrong. Joe may have physically been the right size for hockey but his age was going to keep him from being able to get on the ice again, and Kevin and Marcus would have another decade or two before they'd be able to play. They were all effectively screwed, until Kevin felt like being twenty-three again.

A storm cloud crossed Kevin's face again, furious at not having his Joe heed his demands.

"Hockey, Joe!"

"How do you even know how to pronounce _hockey_ when you can't say _bathroom _right?" Joe muttered.

Pavs skated over to them, wincing at Kevin's expression. "Maybe we'll just buy some skates for them. If they're going to be stuck around a hockey team like this for a while, we might as well get them their own skates so we don't have to deal with this every single day."

"About that." They all looked up as the coach came out of the tunnel, a grim look on his face. Joe's mom's friend Peter looked rather unhappy, and everyone seemed to sense it; even Kevin shut up to pay attention, if only for a moment.

Coach looked around the ice, as if taking a second to steel himself.

"Kevin's parents have been calling nonstop since they found out what happened."

Pavs frowned. "How did they even know?"

A rather intimidating stare was leveled at Joe. "Apparently Joe's mother felt that they should know, so that they didn't wonder why Kevin wasn't playing and wasn't answering their phone calls."

Admittedly it sounded like kind of a dick move for the team _not_ to tell Kevin's parents, and it also sounded like exactly the sort of thing that would get Joe's mom trying to create some sort of NHL Moms phone tree, but that still didn't mean that Joe wanted to be blamed for this.

"I didn't tell her to!" He hadn't even spoken to his mom since he'd finally been told the truth.

Coach sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. "No, I'm sure you didn't," he muttered tiredly, the general demeanor of someone who had had many phone calls with Joe's mother.

"But that doesn't change that Kevin's parents know what happened, and they want to come out here and take him home until things go back to normal."

Joe could have sworn that a hole opened up in the ice right under him, because he felt like his legs had been taken out from under him.

"What?"

Some of the guys were already talking, a few voices getting raised while the others muttered, low and worried.

"It can't take _that_ long to fix this," Dilly was saying, while Logan said at the same time, "If he goes, how can he wish them all back to normal?"

"They shouldn't be separated." Martin's voice was evoking the sound of wind chimes again, but it felt more ominous this time, like the metal tinkling frantically together as the wind picked up right before a tornado formed.

Words wouldn't come to Joe. He couldn't even get his thoughts in order, couldn't identify how he felt about any of this.

If Kevin was gone, would he know to wish them back to normal? Would the distance somehow solidify the magic and keep them stuck at these ages? What if they really _were_ stuck this way forever?

And what about that part of his heart that was beating out of his chest thinking about someone taking his idiot baby away?

Amidst all of the talking and a little bit of yelling, and Coach trying to explain that he couldn't stop Kevin's parents from showing up because he _was_ their son – amidst all of that, Kevin looked up at Joe with a confused pout and tugged on the neck of his shirt and asked, "Joe?"

Joe had been around him enough now to know that he was looking for an explanation.

"Your mom and dad want to take you back home."

He didn't know that for sure – technically it was possible that they would stay with Kevin in Kevin's place here, wherever that was – but it seemed most likely that they'd take him back with them, if they thought this was going to be something long-term.

Fuck. Joe didn't even know where Kevin was from.

He watched as Kevin's head tilted to the side in consternation, little brow furrowed as he tried to puzzle out what Joe had said.

"Joe," he said slowly, "We play hockey."

Well shit, that did nothing to make Joe feel any better. "Your parents are worried about you. They want to come take care of you themselves. You miss your mom and dad, right?"

Actually, to his knowledge neither of the kids had mentioned their parents this whole time, which was pretty bizarre. Joe was fairly sure he had been more homesick for his mom than either of the kids. But then again, like Patty had said, the kids had seemed to view this whole thing as one big Hockey Adventure, and so they had taken everything in stride so far, even when they were spending all of their time with literal strangers.

Except Joe. Somehow Joe was never a stranger to them.

"Joe," Kevin said again, voice getting a little more insistent. "We play _hockey_, Joe."

"We can't, bud. I told you, we're too little. We can't play hockey like this, and so your mom and dad want to take you home with them."

A strange array of emotions seemed to cross Kevin's face all at once, like he was trying to put two puzzle pieces together to understand what was going on and he couldn't because they weren't even from the same puzzle.

"Shark hockey, Joe." It came out a little bit more like _Sark_. "Play Shark hockey."

Joe was stunned he even knew the team name.

Well. Their logo was on enough things, he had probably noticed the shark images everywhere.

"Kev, we _can't_." Before he started trying to explain again, Joe caught Martin's eye, and it was like the idea just popped into his brain.

"Kevin, you made a wish for us to be little," Joe said, because he didn't even know if Kevin knew the word _young_. "You did magic, and now we're all little, you, me, and Marcus, but we're too little to play hockey with the Sharks, because they're all big, right? You're too little to play hockey, so your mom and dad want to take you home.

The growing red on Kevin's face was a sign of approaching mutiny. He squirmed, all pointy elbows and knees again, and Joe fumbled him into his other arm to keep from dropping him.

"Hockey, Joe!" he growled.

Joe shook his head, not having to fake the sadness in his face. "We can't, bud. You're going to have to go with your parents, and you won't get to play hockey with the Sharks. Your parents are gonna take you away from me and Marcus and none of us will get to play hockey."

He was perhaps laying it on a little thick, but the others had started to quiet down and take notice as Kevin burst into tears.

"No!" He was zero-to-sixty, straight from angry to full-on sobs. "I play hockey with Joe!"

Joe was already shaking his head again. "I'm sorry, no. You can't; you're too small. You'd have to wish for us all to be big again to play hockey."

Kevin whined Joe's name again and it took everything in Joe's power to try to put Kevin down on the ice, to try to get his point across. Naturally Kevin's fists refused to uncurl from his shirt, and so Joe repeated yesterday's action of tugging the shirt off over his head.

"Jumbo-" Pavs started tiredly, but Joe held up one finger, asking for a moment to see if he could make this work.

He dropped the shirt in Kevin's grip and left Kevin sitting on the ice, tears streaming down his red face, clutching Joe's shirt to his chest and absolutely wailing.

"Joe! Joe, _no!_" He held out his little arms, trying to get Joe to come back to him, and it was breaking Joe's fucking heart to refuse when the kid was clearly so distraught.

"You have to wish for us to be big again and then we can play hockey, Kevin," Joe said again. "You have to make a wish."

"_Joe!_"

He skated back a foot. "No, Kev, you gotta do this. You have to wish for us to be big again and then you can stay and we can play hockey together."

"Maybe it's not even him," Timo groused, "Did anyone think of that while we're out here playing toddler torture?"

"It's him," Martin said quietly, but Joe barely heard the words he put a gentle hand on Marcus's shoulder.

"Marcus and I want to play hockey with you, Kevin. We play really great hockey together. But we can't do that until you wish us big again. You have to make a wish, or you have to leave."

Kevin was an alarming shade of red, making big, gasping sobs like he just couldn't control himself, and he probably couldn't, because he was fucking two years old.

"C'mon, Kev," Joe pleaded, his resolve about to break, "Please, make a wish."

But Kevin only keened into Joe's shirt, tiny body wracked by heart-wrenching sobs, and Joe couldn't do it anymore. He knelt down and pulled Kevin into his arms, shushing, "It's okay, I'm sorry, Kev, you're okay-"

-And then Joe wasn't okay, because he was sprawled on his back on the ice with a nearly two-hundred pound sack of elbows and knees and pointy chins on top of him.

And his knees hurt like a son of a bitch.

"Joe?"

Kevin's voice was much deeper than it had been a moment ago, but not unfamiliar.

Joe reached up and patted at his chin.

The beard was back, and so were twenty-one years of memories.

Christ, eighteen was a bad look on him.

"Welcome back, bud," Joe said, struggling to shift Kevin so that he could sit upright. He patted at Kevin's back, trying to get him to move – oh, bare back, because Kevin was extremely naked.

Children's clothes probably didn't survive the wearer rapidly aging two decades very well.

"Well I guess that solves that problem," Coach said.

"My dick is gonna get stuck to the ice," Marcus complained, trying to scrabble to a stand and oh wow, that wasn't something Joe had ever considered in all of his years of nudity. Perhaps he was lucky to only be shirtless.

"Remind me to show you _A Christmas Story_," Pavs said as he and Eddie helped Marcus to his feet. They made quick work of helping him off, probably because standing on ice in bare feet sucked a whole lot of ass.

The rest of the guys were surrounding Joe and Kevin in seconds, half of them trying to actually be helpful and get them upright and the rest just patting at them in congratulations and making comments.

"All it took was getting your shirt off, eh, Jumbo?" Goody asked as he grabbed Kevin under the arms and hauled him upright. Kevin still looked dazed, blinking confusedly and clutching Joe's shirt in his hand. His face was still read and damp, lashes still tacky with tears, even now that his chin had a bit of scruff on it again.

"A little nudity never hurt anyone," Joe agreed, though he hadn't really been looking for an ice bath today and so the sensation of the bare ice against his back hadn't been especially welcome. But he accepted Logan's hand, using it to pull himself to his feet.

He smiled and patted Logan on the shoulder. "Cooch, I want you to know that you were awkward as fuck, and my eighteen year old self thought that you were a bitch."

Logan looked aghast for all of two seconds, before his expression immediately went – yep – straight to bitchy.

"Fuck you and your fucking Farrah Fawcett hair, old man." He shoved at Joe's side, grumbling, "See if I fucking help you again."

"Oh, did you help?" Burnzie asked. His gaze met Joe's, his smile displaying all of his missing teeth and crow's feet, and everything felt right in Joe's world.

"I need to go." Kevin clutched Joe's shirt in front of his groin like that would save them all from the eyeful they were getting – like they didn't see him naked all the time – and tried to turn and leave the ice on his own. It was only Goody grabbing his elbow that kept him from wiping out before he made it to the bench, and once he was through the gate Kevin was off like a shot down the hall.

Well. That part of Joe's world wasn't quite right. He'd have to deal with that in a bit.

At least give Kevin a chance to put some pants on first.

Joe picked up his stick off of the ice and looked at the guys still on the ice with him. "So. Anyone feel like a little shinny?"

"You're fucking shirtless," Cooch protested.

Burnzie laughed and shook his head, eyes shining. "That's never stopped him before."

It was a while longer before they actually trailed back into the dressing room.

Kevin was nowhere to be seen when they arrived. Somehow, Joe wasn't that surprised.

"Did he leave?" he asked Brauner in a low voice.

Brauner smirked a little. "He doesn't have a car or a phone to call for a ride. Unless he also likes to run away to the park..."

"Oh, fuck off," Joe said, but he still gave Brauner a quick hug before he went to take his skates off.

Fuck, but the guys weren't wrong about his knees. That was one part of eighteen that he would love to have back again: a body that didn't ache more than any thirty-nine year old's had a right to.

As Joe was tugging his sneakers back on, a shadow fell across his stall.

When he looked up, Marcus was there – fully clothed, this time – with his arms crossed in front of his chest. His hair was hanging loose in his face, shading it more as he looked down at Joe.

"We gonna talk about this?" he asked.

Joe stretched and groaned, hearing things crackle and pop in his back like a bowl of fucking Rice Krispies.

"Yeah. Do you know where he is?"

Neither of them had to ask what this conversation was for, or who they were having it with.

"Trying to convince Timo to give him a ride home so he can avoid us."

Joe nodded. "Well, best get to it, then." Timo could be a bit of a soft touch for Kevin, after all.

He stood up slowly, doing his best to ease his body back into being geriatric.

"You gonna put on a shirt?" Marcus asked, but there was a hint of a laugh in his voice.

Joe scratched at his beard, immensely thankful that it came back when he re-aged. "Now why would I do a silly thing like that?"

And so Joe was still half-naked when he and Marcus came upon Kevin and Timo speaking in low voices in the hallway. Kevin was, perhaps a little surprisingly though perhaps not, wearing Joe's shirt from earlier, though he'd also acquired jeans.

"Can I steal him for a sec?" Joe gave Timo his best smile; Timo snorted and shook his head.

"You've got ten minutes and then I'm leaving." He should have been saying it to Kevin, who looked a little betrayed that Timo would leave him with Joe like that, but he instead directed it towards Joe, with his eyes sliding _meaningfully_ towards Kevin. It was a little tempting to tell Timo to just piss on the kid already if he needed to stake his claim, but then Kevin would actually die of mortification.

Joe just kept on smiling. "You can't rush tender family moments."

Timo rolled his eyes, but Joe knew he was burying a smirk as he walked away.

Success.

When he turned to Kevin, he felt a little bit less successful. Kevin looked near to how Joe had seen him on the ice, face flushed red, eyes wide and panicked, trying to stutter excuses and apologies.

Joe silenced him with a hand on his shoulder. "Kev. Let's take a seat."

He didn't give Kevin an option, slowly lowering himself to the floor and yanking Kevin's arm until Kevin sat down next to him. Without a word Marcus settled himself on Kevin's other side, successfully bookending him and also blocking off his escape routes.

There was a reason they worked well together as a line.

"So." Joe clapped his hands together and then gently nudged Kevin's side with his elbow. "You made a wish."

Kevin's knees were drawn up to his chest, and he stared resolutely at his hands pressed between them.

"I'm so sorry," he mumbled, almost too quietly to be heard. "You have to – please believe me, I didn't mean for it to happen. I didn't know-"

Joe hushed him as he wrapped an arm around his shoulders, tugging Kevin against his side. Marcus slumped in against Kevin's other side as if they were tied together, filling in space between them.

"Most people don't know about hockey magic," Joe said softly. "Hell, I didn't find out until I was twenty-four and one of my goalies turned a defenseman into a brick wall."

He knew he'd gotten through when Kevin startled against him and Marcus peered over in interest.

"He _what_?"

Joe smiled widely. "He wanted better defense."

Kevin shook his head in disbelief, but his color was starting to go back to normal. "I didn't wish for anything – or I didn't try to. I just...I'm so sorry, for everything."

"Stop apologizing."

Joe couldn't see where Marcus poked Kevin, but it was enough to make Kevin jump and give him an affronted look; Marcus was unmoved.

"We know you didn't want to be two years old," he said, and even Kevin had to concede that point. It may have been believable that a guy Joe's age would wish to be eighteen again, but nobody wished to be a toddler.

A thought came to Joe. "How much do you actually remember?"

Joe liked to think that he knew Kevin fairly well at this point, and so he held him tighter when Kevin stiffened up again. "Not much...but I know I must have been really annoying, and-"

He jumped when Marcus prodded him again. "You were very loud," he told Kevin, "And I remember I thought you were very fun."

"Bony elbows," Joe continued, "And you liked to wear my shirts..."

Kevin flushed again and started to apologize, but Joe interrupted this time. "Oh, come on, man, I _give_ you my shirts like every day, do you think I mind it?"

Even Kevin had to eventually concede on that one, shrugging awkwardly.

"I'm still sorry. I didn't think something like that would happen."

He seemed resolute in his desire to never look either of them in the eye, staring alternately at his hands and knees or the wall across from them. Joe met Marcus's eyes over Kevin's head.

As gently as he could, Joe said, "Tell me what you think you wished for."

He could feel it as Kevin shrunk against him, curling into his grip this time.

"I don't know. That I didn't want to lose this. That I wished we could keep playing together."

Marcus raised an eyebrow at Joe and Joe asked, "You sure that's all?"

He let Kevin have his moment of silence as he deliberated on what to say. Joe hoped Timo wasn't actually standing around the corner with a timer running, though knowing Timo, he could be.

"I think," Kevin said slowly, softly, "I think I just wanted us to be able to keep playing together. Because – because the three of us fit so well together, and it just doesn't seem fair that we only just got to have this, and everyone keeps talking about how-"

His words cut out, but Joe knew where the sentence was going.

"The media is all talking about how maybe this is my last year with the team."

He kept himself still as Kevin burst into motion beside him; he'd give Kevin a pass for this elbow to the kidney, but he swore to himself that was the last one Kevin was getting away with.

"It's bullshit!" Kevin exploded. "You play amazing, and so what if your knees are fucked up? You play better than half the guys in the league! You're a legend! And we all know the Sharks will keep signing you as long as you want to be here, and-"

"And we don't know if my knees will hold out," Joe concluded.

Kevin deflated all over again, but this time he put his head on Joe's shoulder, like he'd given up on pretending that he didn't want to. Frankly, Joe was surprised that Kevin had held out that long; usually he was constantly worming his way under Joe's arm.

"It's not fair," Kevin mumbled, chin tucked to his chest. "I'm just hitting my stride here and the three of us play amazing hockey together..."

"And if we all met earlier, we could play together longer," Marcus said. He patted Kevin's knee, and Kevin sighed and took his hand, squeezed it just for a second and let go.

"I'm sorry, man. I didn't mean for this to happen. It was just a passing thought that I wished we could have all played together when Jumbo was younger, so that we'd have more time. So that we could win Jumbo the Cup. Obviously I didn't think it would come true – or that we'd be little kids in that scenario, even if that's how old we were when Jumbo was young. But you and I have a bunch of more years together; I'm sorry you got dragged into this."

Joe knew that Marcus wouldn't hold a grudge or make Kevin feel bad about something like this, but it still made his chest feel warm when Marcus shrugged and nudged Kevin's side, saying, "I just appreciate being included. Linemate bonding, right?"

Kevin snorted, "Some fucking bonding."

"Hey."

They both looked over when Joe spoke.

He smiled.

"Look, boys, I can't promise how long I'm going to be playing. Ideally until I'm eighty, but that's only if I can get a bionic knee first. But I can tell you that I'm gonna play as long as I can. And before you start blaming yourself again, this whole experience gave me a bit of time to think. So thank you for that."

He nudged Kevin's side again, and this time when Kevin blushed, it was a little bit pleased.

"I thought a lot about how much my rookie year sucked – because it did. And I thought a lot about how at least on paper, I sound like I'm at the end of my career, and I've achieved a bunch of things I never thought I'd get and I've failed to do other things I was so sure I'd have done. And then our own favorite Mr. Martin Jones gave me a bit of perspective on how these wishes work. How they give you what you need, and not always what you want."

Joe squeezed Kevin's shoulder again. "Look, we can't turn back time so that we can get more time to play together. Clearly we tried that and it didn't work. But what I can tell you is that this right here, the three of us? That's not going away even if I retire. We've shared a bed now, that means we're bonded for life."

He heard Marcus huff a laugh, but Kevin looked down again.

"You don't know that," he said quietly.

"I don't?"

Joe grabbed Kevin's chin, tilted it up until Kevin had to look at him again.

"Kid, when I get cut I bleed fucking teal. They're going to have to carry me out of here in a Sharks body bag because that's about the only way I'll leave this team, and then I'll just haunt this arena and put shaving cream in Timo's shoes. Retirement doesn't mean I won't just loiter around the team until they give me a title and a job to do; if it worked for Nabby, it can work for me.

"And just because we're not playing together doesn't mean I'm not going to harass you into spending time with me. I'm going to be a bored old man with _so_ much time on my hands, and I'll constantly be making you take me places – because you'll be the one with money, so you'll have to pay for me, of course – and I'll give you my shirts because I don't want them, and you'll be so fucking sick of me you'll beg me to leave and I won't because you're my rookie and you're stuck with me for life. The three of us play well together because we're three good hockey players; all that means is that you're going to keep being a great hockey player, even when I'm gone. And I'm not going anywhere."

The hallway was quiet when Joe stopped speaking. He knew the boys were probably surprised; they'd never heard Joe make any big speeches before. Kevin was right that it was a shame they hadn't met earlier – if they'd been just a bit older, they would have heard Joe's captain speeches. He had made some stellar captain speeches in his day.

"You make it sound easy," Kevin finally said, quiet and tired.

"Oh, bud. Sometimes it's the hardest fucking thing you'll ever do." He sighed, tipped his head back against the wall. "But if there's one thing I've learned about getting old, it's that it keeps happening whether we want it to or not. And we treat it like it's something to be afraid of, but when I was eighteen? All I could think was that it sounded like my life as an almost-forty year old sounded pretty fantastic. Because one day we're all gonna have a life after hockey, and that life will have nothing to do with what we achieved and everything to do with what kind of person we are and who we spend our lives with. And I'm telling you, you two losers are going to keep being a part of my life whether you want to or not."

"I will flee to Sweden," Marcus said with some finality.

"I do enjoy a good chase."

Joe squeezed Kevin to him again and then reached over to scrub his hand over Marcus's hair before he stretched his arms over his own head.

"What I'm saying is that we have to make the most of our careers here, but our careers aren't the be-all end-all of our lives. I plan to win the Cup with this team, don't doubt that for a second. But things like this, right here? This is just as important. Maybe even more."

He dragged himself to a stand, trying to ignore how his body protested being made to sit on the floor. "Any questions?"

The boys stared up at him, both looking far too much like they needed a good, long nap.

"You're such a dad," Marcus finally said.

"Yes," Joe agreed, because at this point he'd long ago accepted that fact that he had adopted no less than five very large hockey playing children and probably had a few more floating around here somewhere. "And that means you have to listen to my wisdom and sage life advice."

"Timo said you jumped out of the car," Kevin said.

"Do as I say, not as I do. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make an important phone call to a man from Saskatchewan," Joe said primly, dusting his pants off.

Kevin groaned. "Tell Patty I'm sorry I ruined his visit."

"Are you kidding? He thought that was the funniest shit he's ever seen. I'm going to be hearing about this for decades."

As he said it, though, he was smiling. He couldn't fucking wait.

When Joe came to the arena next morning, bags packed for their road trip, he found a coloring page depicting a white hippo wearing a top hat taped to his stall.

_For the best Moominpappa_, was written underneath it in green, signed with a heart.

It was sweet. Joe was definitely keeping it.

He wouldn't mind a Stanley Cup or four. But this, his boys, this line, this team.

This was good enough.

He'd still have to get the Swedes to explain what the fuck the hippo was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no proof that Kevin wears Joe’s shirts. But Joe is notoriously shirtless and Kevin solely wears team-branded shirts that are far too big for him, and he loves his dad. You do the math.

**Author's Note:**

> BTW [this post](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/post/184587661789) is basically. a summary of this fic. it's uncanny.
> 
> I can be found at [swedishgoaliemafia on Tumblr](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/).


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